Nvidia's $250 Billion Financing Guarantee for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion in financing so OpenAI can lease the 10-gigawatt Ohio campus SoftBank's SB Energy is building ^[1]. That guarantee alone doesn't cover the compute itself: Nvidia is also discussing a separate financing structure for OpenAI's chip purchases, reported at up to $350 billion ^[2], pushing total project cost above $500 billion once the chips are installed ^[3]. The reason Nvidia's signature matters is blunt - OpenAI has never turned a profit and doesn't carry an investment-grade credit rating, so lenders need Nvidia's backing to extend favorable debt terms to the project ^[2]. In effect, Nvidia isn't just selling chips into this deal, it's underwriting the buyer's ability to pay for them.

The arrangement has become the sharpest flashpoint yet in a running argument about circular financing in AI infrastructure, where the chipmaker underwrites the very customer buying its chips. Jefferies technology strategist Jeffrey Favuzza called it "the clearest and largest example yet of potential circular financing" ^[4]. Seaport Research's Jay Goldberg was blunter, warning that "these kinds of financing usually don't end well" and citing Lucent as a cautionary example ^[4]. Bernstein's Stacy Rasgon added that Nvidia's broader pattern, investing in and financing more than 50 VC-backed AI companies over the past year, "clearly fuel[s] circular concerns" ^[5]. Not everyone agrees: commentary attributed to Janus Henderson pushed back, framing these vendor-financing loops as a "virtuous circle" that efficiently aligns builders, chip suppliers, and customers rather than a bubble warning sign ^[4].

The physical site carries its own historical irony: roughly 3,700 acres of federal Department of Energy land in Piketon, Ohio, the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility that shut down in 2001 ^[6]. The site was once called the "A Plant"; it's now positioned to become the "AI Plant" ^[6]. Power for the site is controlled by the U.S. government and partly financed by Japan, tied to Tokyo's pledge under a recent trade deal to invest $33 billion in a natural gas plant, while SB Energy separately builds out roughly 9.2 gigawatts of new natural-gas generation to feed the campus ^[7][8]. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has reportedly been personally involved in deciding how that power gets allocated, with OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google all competing for capacity at the same site ^[6].

If the financing comes together, it would mark OpenAI's first real step toward owning and controlling its own compute infrastructure rather than renting capacity from Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle ^[3]. That's a meaningful strategic shift: OpenAI is also an investor in SB Energy, the SoftBank unit developing the campus ^[8], giving it a stake on both sides of the lease. For Nvidia, the calculus is more straightforward - locking in a customer of this size across a decade-scale, chip-dense facility secures demand for its hardware well beyond the current product cycle ^[7].

None of this is finalized. Coverage of the reported guarantee stresses that negotiations are still underway and terms have yet to be finalized ^[1]. The build-out itself is a multi-year bet: the first phase, roughly 800 megawatts, is targeted for 2028, with the full 10-gigawatt campus arriving well beyond that ^[1][3]. The project is already drawing local political friction - an Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate has called for a conditional moratorium on further data center development tied to union-labor and environmental requirements ^[3].