Analysis
Nvidia is negotiating a financing guarantee worth roughly $250 billion to help OpenAI lease a planned 10-gigawatt data center campus that SoftBank's energy subsidiary is developing in Piketon, Ohio, on the site of a former uranium-enrichment facility, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. A separate financing structure under discussion could add another roughly $350 billion to help fund the Nvidia chips that would actually power the site, pushing the project's total eventual cost past half a trillion dollars.
The arrangement extends a financing pattern that has defined 2026's AI infrastructure buildout: rather than customers simply buying chips, Nvidia increasingly backstops the debt that lets those customers afford to buy them at all, turning the company into both supplier and lender across its biggest accounts. OpenAI has separately disclosed more than $1.4 trillion in cumulative compute commitments this year across deals with Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, AWS and now potentially SoftBank's Ohio site, a scale of forward-looking spend that dwarfs the company's current revenue.
“Critics of circular AI financing -- where chip suppliers fund customers who then buy more chips -- will find this deal Exhibit A.”
The first phase of the Ohio campus targets roughly 800 megawatts of capacity, with completion slated for 2028 -- a multi-year runway that leaves plenty of room for the financing structure to change before ground is even fully broken. Comparable recent deals include Nvidia's $100 billion staged investment in OpenAI announced earlier this year and Meta's own roughly $27 billion Hyperion data center financing with Blue Owl, part of a broader shift toward off-balance-sheet structures for AI infrastructure that let hyperscalers avoid carrying the full capital cost on their own books.
For GPs and LPs, the number itself matters less than what it signals about who actually bears the risk if AI demand growth disappoints: a $250 billion guarantee effectively makes Nvidia a creditor to its own largest customer, concentrating exposure in exactly the company whose stock and debt markets are already the most sensitive to any AI-spending pullback. Critics of circular AI financing -- where chip suppliers fund customers who then buy more chips -- will find this deal Exhibit A.
Nothing here is finalized. The Journal describes negotiations as ongoing, with terms unsettled and no certainty either guarantee closes as currently structured. What to watch: whether Nvidia and OpenAI announce definitive terms in the coming weeks, how debt-rating agencies treat Nvidia's expanding guarantee exposure, and whether this week's big tech earnings -- Microsoft and Meta report Wednesday, Apple and Amazon Thursday -- reveal any investor pushback on financing structures like this one.
