Nvidia to back OpenAI Ohio center with $250bn guarantee

Nvidia is in advanced discussions to provide a financial guarantee worth approximately $250 billion to support OpenAI's lease of a massive new data center campus in southern Ohio, according to a report published on July 26. The deal, if finalized, would represent one of the largest financing arrangements in technology history and signal a strategic shift for the chipmaker into a central financial architect of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The guarantee would back OpenAI's lease of a planned 10-gigawatt data center campus being developed by an energy subsidiary of SoftBank. The total project cost, including the advanced Nvidia graphics processing units required to power the facility, is estimated to exceed $500 billion. The reported $250 billion guarantee would cover lease and construction financing but not the purchase of the chips themselves. Separate discussions are reportedly underway for Nvidia to also finance OpenAI's chip purchases, a package that could reach roughly $350 billion.

For OpenAI, the arrangement would mark a significant step toward owning its core computing infrastructure, reducing its reliance on renting capacity from cloud providers like Microsoft,...