Nvidia is negotiating a financial guarantee worth roughly $250 billion that would let OpenAI lease a massive SoftBank data center campus under construction in southern Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report published July 26 and echoed by Reuters, Bloomberg and other outlets. Nvidia, OpenAI and the U.S. Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment, and Reuters said it could not independently verify the report.
The guarantee, still under negotiation according to people familiar with the talks, would cover OpenAI’s lease payments and construction debt on the 10-gigawatt campus being built by SoftBank’s energy subsidiary. If OpenAI defaulted, Nvidia would step in to cover the obligation — a structure that effectively substitutes Nvidia’s balance sheet for OpenAI’s own, since OpenAI does not carry an investment-grade credit rating. Separately, the two companies are discussing as much as $350 billion in financing tied to the GPUs that would fill the facility, the report said, pushing the project’s eventual cost above $500 billion once chips are included.
Why a backstop, not a loan
The arrangement underscores how OpenAI, still privately held and without the balance sheet of a Microsoft or Amazon, is leaning on its chip supplier to unlock financing that traditional lenders won’t extend on their own. The campus’s first phase — about 800 megawatts — is slated to come online in 2028, with the remaining capacity built out in later stages.
The talks add to a run of outsized AI infrastructure financing this year. Nvidia has separately backed a $500 billion partnership with SK Group for AI buildout in South Korea, part of a pattern of the chipmaker underwriting the very compute its own chips will fill. OpenAI, for its part, is already building a $20 billion campus in coastal Georgia and holds separate data center commitments with Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon.
Nothing has been signed, and the deal’s terms could still change or collapse before an agreement is reached, the Journal’s sources cautioned.