Nvidia Talks to Backstop $250B OpenAI Data Center Deal in Ohio

Nvidia is in advanced discussions to provide roughly $250 billion in financial guarantees to help OpenAI lease a colossal 10-gigawatt data center complex in southern Ohio — what would be the largest such project ever announced. The site is being developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary controlled by Masayoshi Son, on a decommissioned uranium-enrichment facility about 50 miles south of Columbus. The total cost of the project, including the Nvidia chips that would fill the data centers, could exceed $500 billion.

The backstop is necessary because OpenAI lacks an investment-grade credit rating as an unprofitable private company, making it harder for SB Energy to raise construction debt on favorable terms. By wrapping OpenAI's lease obligations with Nvidia's guarantee, lenders gain confidence that the funding is secure — a financing technique known in the industry as a 'credit wrapper.' Google has used a similar structure to backstop some Anthropic data centers, partly to drive sales of its own in-house AI chips.

The deal is deeply entangled with U.S. government policy. The power for the project sits on federal land and is partly funded by Japan as part of a recent trade deal: Tokyo agreed to invest $33 billion in a natural-gas power plant on the Ohio site in exchange for lower U.S. tariffs. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is personally involved in deciding who receives the power allocation. Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all spoken with Lutnick about the site, but OpenAI has shown the most interest. The first phase — about 800 megawatts — is expected to come online in 2028.

Beyond the $250 billion data-center guarantee, Nvidia is separately discussing financing the chip purchase for OpenAI, which could total an additional $350 billion. Combined, these circular funding arrangements — where Nvidia effectively finances its own chip sales — have raised concerns among observers that the AI infrastructure boom could be fragile if investor sentiment shifts or AI revenue growth disappoints. Nvidia itself flagged in its most recent annual report that such financing arrangements could lower its near-term cash flows and increase its exposure to customer credit risk. The company carries a roughly $5 trillion market valuation and has already invested $30 billion directly in OpenAI.

For OpenAI, the Ohio campus would represent its first foray as a direct data center tenant, reducing dependence on cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle. The company recently raised its projected compute spending to around $750 billion through 2030, up from $600 billion projected earlier this year. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are racing toward IPOs at sky-high valuations, adding pressure to keep scaling infrastructure aggressively.