OpenAI is negotiating with Nvidia over a backstop worth up to $250 billion that would underpin debt for a giant Ohio data center campus.
Key Points:
- Nvidia is in talks to guarantee as much as $250 billion of financing tied to a 10-gigawatt data center campus in Pike County, Ohio.
- The guarantee would cover lease and construction debt, letting OpenAI borrow on the chipmaker's credit rather than its own.
- The full project could cost more than $500 billion, and people familiar with the talks say the terms are not settled.
Nvidia Backstop Covers Ohio Lease
The arrangement would let OpenAI raise money against Nvidia's credit for a 10-gigawatt campus in Pike County, Ohio. The guarantee would cover lease and construction obligations, leaving out the processors that will fill the buildings. OpenAI needs that support because it remains unprofitable and carries no investment-grade credit rating, the benchmark lenders use before committing to long-dated debt.
SoftBank's power unit, SB Energy, is developing the site, a decommissioned uranium-enrichment property roughly 50 miles south of Columbus that broke ground in March. Total costs could exceed $500 billion once computing hardware is counted, which would make it the largest data center project announced so far.
Ten gigawatts roughly matches the annual electricity use of 8 million American households, and the first phase of about 800 megawatts is due to start operating in 2028. Federal officials control the power supply, and Japan agreed to fund a natural-gas project on the land under a recent trade deal. Nvidia declined to comment, and people familiar with the discussions said the terms could still change.
Also Read: Kimi K3 Becomes The Largest Open-Weight Model Ever With 2.8 Trillion Parameters
Michael Burry Questions Circular Financing
Michael Burry, the investor known for betting against the housing market, wrote on X that the deal amounts to Nvidia guaranteeing OpenAI's spending on Nvidia's own chips. He had already added to his short position in the chipmaker days earlier, alongside fresh bets against other companies tied to the data center boom.
Technology commentator Ed Zitron raised similar objections and questioned SoftBank's role as developer. Critics have applied that same reasoning to the tangle of investments linking Nvidia, OpenAI and CoreWeave. A separate negotiation over chip purchases, worth as much as $350 billion, sits alongside the backstop talks and would push the combined figure toward $600 billion.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana said the structure looks constructive for neocloud operators such as CoreWeave and Crusoe Energy.
He argued it shows Nvidia will support far larger build-outs, easing concern that funding markets cannot absorb the next wave, and named coming earnings from Microsoft, Amazon and Meta as the real test.
Nvidia OpenAI Funding History
The two companies have rewritten their financial arrangements before. Nvidia signed a letter of intent in September 2025 to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, tied to the deployment of 10 gigawatts of its systems.
That commitment shrank to a $30 billion equity stake in a $110 billion funding round, which Jensen Huang later called likely his company's last check before OpenAI goes public.
Read Next: Bitget Expands UNICEF Skills Push To Bangladesh, Indonesia And Bolivia