Nvidia in talks for $250bn guarantee to back OpenAI's Ohio data center lease

The Ohio project

The data center is being developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, on land leased from the U.S. Department of Energy in Piketon, Ohio, about 68 miles south of Columbus. The full project is expected to cost more than $500 billion, including the advanced chips that will power it, making it one of the largest AI infrastructure projects ever proposed. The first phase is scheduled to come online in 2028, delivering approximately 800 megawatts of computing capacity. Ohio already hosts 166 operational data centers with another 57 planned, ranking fourth in the United States behind Virginia, Texas and California.

Nvidia's financial guarantee

Nvidia is negotiating a roughly $250 billion backstop that would cover OpenAI's lease payments and related debt, but not the cost of the chips themselves. The guarantee would act as a "credit wrapper," allowing the project to secure debt on more favorable terms by reducing lender risk. OpenAI, a private company that is not yet profitable, lacks the credit rating to finance such a project on its own. Nvidia is also in separate talks to provide up to $350 billion in financing for OpenAI's purchase of semiconductors for the facility. The chipmaker's involvement would help lock in years of demand for its AI processors.

Government role and power supply

The project is a public-private partnership backed by the U.S. government. Electricity for the site will come from a U.S.-controlled power allocation, funded in part by a $33 billion Japanese investment in a natural gas plant under a recent trade agreement. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been involved in deciding access to that power supply, and the deal will not be final without his approval. The Trump administration has celebrated the investment as a major success.

Competition for the lease

OpenAI is the leading contender to become the main tenant, but it faces competition from Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, all of which have held discussions with Secretary Lutnick in recent weeks. SoftBank and government officials are leaning toward OpenAI because Nvidia's backing has added financial weight to its proposal. OpenAI has been in advanced talks for several weeks and, according to a June report by The Information, has already signed a potential 20-year lease that would give it control over both equipment and facility payments.

Circular financing concerns

The arrangement intensifies scrutiny of the circular financing patterns that have come to define the AI boom. Start-ups raise billions from tech giants and then channel those funds back to the same companies for computing power and services. Critics argue that such deals blur the line between genuine market demand and self-dealing.

What is happening right now with OpenAI and others is that they have the need for computing, but apparently they don't really have the revenue or the financial capability to engage in the capital expenditures necessary to support their activities.

OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, remains unprofitable, and its partners held as much as $96 billion in debt as of November. The deal echoes Google's earlier backing of Anthropic data centers, which similarly aimed to boost sales of its own AI chips.

Market reaction

Nvidia shares fell 5% on Monday following the Wall Street Journal report, reflecting investor unease over the sums now flowing into artificial intelligence and the risk that more capacity is being built than future AI services will require. Major U.S. companies from Meta to Alphabet have increased borrowing in recent months to fund infrastructure expansion, fueling concerns about overly ambitious spending on a technology that has yet to deliver consistent returns.