Nvidia weighs $250 billion guarantee to back OpenAI's Ohio data center campus

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion in financing that would let OpenAI lease a planned 10-gigawatt data center campus in Piketon, Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by CNBC on Monday. The campus, being developed by SoftBank's energy subsidiary SB Energy, is expected to cost more than $500 billion in total once fully built out — making the Nvidia guarantee one of the largest single financing arrangements proposed in the AI infrastructure buildout to date.

The deal reflects a strategic shift already underway across the AI industry: instead of leasing compute capacity from cloud hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, the largest AI labs are increasingly moving to control dedicated physical infrastructure directly. For OpenAI, securing its own data center campus — rather than renting time on someone else's — would mark a first step toward that kind of infrastructure independence.

What the $250 Billion Actually Covers

The proposed guarantee would back the real estate lease and construction debt financing for the Ohio campus itself — not the computing hardware that will run inside it. Nvidia is reportedly negotiating a separate financing package, worth as much as $350 billion, to cover OpenAI's purchase of the GPUs that will fill the facility. Combined, the two arrangements would put Nvidia's total exposure to this single project north of $600 billion, though neither deal has been finalized and negotiations remain ongoing.

The site itself carries its own history: the campus is planned for a former uranium enrichment facility — the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant — where Department of Energy demolition work on old enrichment buildings is still underway in places. The project broke ground on March 20, 2026, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick both attending in person, underscoring the federal government's direct involvement in siting and permitting AI infrastructure at this scale.

Why Nvidia Would Take This Deal

For Nvidia, financing the lease and the chips both serves the same purpose: locking in demand for its GPUs years into the future at a scale few single customers can match. A commitment of this size effectively guarantees Nvidia a buyer for a substantial slice of its next several generations of data center silicon, insulating the company from any slowdown in AI infrastructure spending elsewhere in the market.

The arrangement also signals a broader evolution in Nvidia's business model — from a company that primarily sells chips to one that increasingly finances the infrastructure those chips run inside. That shift mirrors moves by other major AI infrastructure players competing for the same regional power capacity; Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft are all separately competing for energy access in the same region, with Commerce Secretary Lutnick overseeing power allocation decisions for the federal site.

Status and What Comes Next

Both the $250 billion real estate guarantee and the $350 billion chip financing package remain under negotiation, with no signed contracts confirmed as of this report. Deals of this scale typically take months to finalize given the number of parties involved — OpenAI, Nvidia, SoftBank's SB Energy, and multiple federal agencies overseeing the site and regional power grid. If completed as reported, it would represent one of the largest infrastructure financing commitments in the AI industry's history, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.