Nvidia weighs $250 B guarantee for OpenAI Ohio data center

Nvidia is in discussions to provide a financing guarantee of roughly $250 billion to support OpenAI’s plan to lease a massive new data center in Ohio, according to multiple reports. The deal, if finalized, would represent one of the largest artificial intelligence infrastructure projects ever conceived and underscores the extraordinary scale of capital flowing into the sector.

The proposed arrangement would see Nvidia’s credit backing debt financing for OpenAI to lease a 10-gigawatt data center campus being developed by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, in Piketon, southern Ohio. The total project cost, including the computing hardware required to operate it, is expected to exceed $500 billion. Nvidia’s guarantee would cover the lease and associated construction debt but not the purchase of Nvidia’s own chips for the facility, which the companies are separately discussing financing for in a deal that could be worth up to $350 billion.

For OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, securing the Ohio site would mark a strategic shift toward controlling its own dedicated computing infrastructure, moving beyond its current reliance on cloud services from partners like Microsoft, Amazon,...