Nvidia May Finance OpenAI's Largest AI Data Center at $500B Scale

Nvidia is in talks to provide financial guarantees of up to $250 billion for OpenAI's lease of a 10-gigawatt data center project that SoftBank is building in Ohio, Reuters reports, citing The Wall Street Journal. The talks are still in early stages and could still fall apart or change terms.

• Nvidia's $250 billion guarantee would cover OpenAI's obligations under a 20-year lease plus debt financing for the project itself.
• Separately, outside that guarantee, financing for up to $350 billion in Nvidia chip purchases is also under discussion.
• Total project cost — the data center, equipment, and infrastructure combined — could exceed $500 billion.
• The site is a former US Department of Energy uranium enrichment plant in Pike County, Ohio; the first phase, at roughly 800MW, is expected online in 2028.

OpenAI isn't the only company interested in the site: Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic have also held talks with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the project, BigGo Finance notes. For OpenAI, a deal would mark a first step toward owning its own infrastructure instead of leasing capacity from Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle.

“These types of symbiotic deals are becoming the norm as AI infrastructure rolls out.”

— Neil Shah, VP for Research, Counterpoint Research

Quote source: BigGo Finance.

A structure where Nvidia simultaneously invests in OpenAI, guarantees financing for its data center, and supplies its own chips into that same facility raises the circular-financing question analysts keep bringing up about the AI industry. It comes on top of already record capital spending by tech giants on AI infrastructure, including OpenAI's own $30 billion Georgia data center, which we covered earlier.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.