Nvidia may back OpenAI's Ohio data center
Nvidia is reportedly in talks to guarantee $250B for OpenAI's 10GW Ohio site and fund $350B in chip purchases separately, WSJ reports.
Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion in financing for a 10-gigawatt data center campus OpenAI plans to lease from SoftBank Energy in southern Ohio, on a decommissioned uranium-enrichment site about 50 miles south of Columbus, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by CNBC and Yahoo Finance on July 27. Separately, Nvidia is discussing financing up to $350 billion of the chip purchases that would fill the facility. Combined with the site’s own build cost, people familiar with the matter put the total project north of $500 billion, a scale with no known precedent among publicly disclosed data center buildouts.
The $250 billion figure covers the lease and construction debt, not the chips themselves, and is structured as a guarantee meant to reassure lenders that the underlying revenue will materialize, rather than a direct cash outlay. Nvidia has already put $30 billion directly into OpenAI. Terms are unfinished and both outlets note the arrangement could still fall through.
What it means for operators
Nvidia backstopping a customer’s real-estate debt is a step beyond the vendor financing it already runs through neocloud GPU-backed loans: here it is underwriting the site itself, on top of the $750 billion in compute spending OpenAI has already committed to. If Nvidia’s own credit is what makes OpenAI’s Ohio campus bankable, any slowdown in Nvidia’s earnings or a stumble in OpenAI’s revenue growth becomes a shared risk for both companies, not just OpenAI’s problem. Treat this as a signal that AI infrastructure financing is now concentrated enough that Nvidia’s balance sheet, not just its chip roadmap, belongs on your risk radar if you plan around either company’s capacity commitments.