A financing arrangement now under discussion would place Nvidia’s balance sheet behind roughly $250 billion in obligations tied to a 10-gigawatt data center campus in southern Ohio — an arrangement that would rank among the largest private financing structures ever assembled in the technology sector, and one that pushes the chipmaker well past its traditional role as a supplier of hardware.
The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Nvidia is in talks to provide a guarantee of about $250 billion to help OpenAI lease the planned campus, which is being developed by SoftBank’s energy subsidiary, according to people familiar with the discussions. Nvidia, OpenAI and SoftBank had not commented publicly as of press time.
What the guarantee actually covers
The structure is narrower than the headline number suggests, and the distinction matters. The proposed guarantee applies to the lease and construction financing — not to the purchase of the Nvidia processors that would fill the buildings. Separately, Nvidia is said to be discussing a financing arrangement covering OpenAI’s chip orders, which could run to roughly $350 billion.
The reason a chipmaker would guarantee someone else’s real estate obligations comes down to credit. Nvidia’s backing would let the developer raise debt on better terms by easing lender concerns about OpenAI’s lack of an investment-grade credit rating. OpenAI generates enormous revenue and enormous losses; lenders financing a multi-decade physical asset want a counterparty they can underwrite. Nvidia, sitting on one of the strongest balance sheets in corporate America, can supply that credit where OpenAI cannot.
The scale
The full project could ultimately cost more than $500 billion once the chips are included, with the first phase — roughly 800 megawatts — targeted for completion in 2028. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son has previously put the total cost of the buildout near the same half-trillion-dollar mark.
Ten gigawatts is not an incremental expansion. It is generation capacity on the order of a mid-sized state’s peak residential load, dedicated to a single tenant’s computing needs. That has implications far beyond the parties named in the deal — for Ohio’s grid operators, for regional power pricing, for construction labor across the Ohio Valley, and for the utilities now being asked to plan around industrial customers whose demand curves look nothing like anything they have served before.
Why each side wants it
For OpenAI, an agreement would mark a first move toward controlling its own infrastructure rather than renting capacity from Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. For Nvidia, it would lock in demand for its chips for years ahead.
That second point is where the arrangement starts drawing scrutiny. A supplier guaranteeing the financing that allows a customer to buy the supplier’s product is a structure with a long and uneven history in capital markets. Michael Burry and technology commentator Ed Zitron both raised objections over the weekend, framing the reported backstop as evidence of mounting bubble risk in AI infrastructure. Burry increased his short position against Nvidia on Friday.
The counterargument is straightforward: Nvidia is not lending OpenAI money to buy chips in the guarantee itself — that piece is carved out — and the underlying asset is a physical campus with power interconnection that has value to other tenants if the primary lease fails. Microsoft, Google and Anthropic have all reportedly expressed interest in the site.
Nothing is signed
Talks remain ongoing and terms have not been finalized, meaning the arrangement could still collapse. Deals of this magnitude are rarely announced in the shape they were first reported, and the gap between a discussed structure and executed documents is where most of the risk lives.
What business owners should watch
For companies outside the AI industry, the relevant question is not whether Nvidia and OpenAI reach terms. It is what happens to the cost and availability of electricity, industrial construction capacity, and skilled trades in regions absorbing this kind of load. Ohio has already become one of the most contested data center markets in the country. A 10-gigawatt anchor tenant changes the pricing environment for every manufacturer, cold-storage operator and commercial landlord drawing from the same grid.
That is the part of this story that will show up in operating budgets long before it shows up in anyone’s quarterly earnings call.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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