Nvidia Weighs $250 Billion Guarantee So OpenAI Can Lease a 10-Gigawatt Ohio Campus
OpenAI can't get an investment-grade credit rating on its own, so Nvidia is discussing backstopping the lease on a $500 billion data center built on a former uranium site.
Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt data center campus in Piketon, Ohio, according to Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. The site is a former uranium enrichment facility about 50 miles south of Columbus, being developed by SoftBank’s energy subsidiary SB Energy. Full build-out, including the chips that would go inside, could exceed $500 billion — the largest data center project announced to date.
The backstop would cover the lease itself and construction debt financing, not the GPUs. Nvidia is negotiating that separately: a possible $350 billion deal to finance OpenAI’s chip purchases for the same campus. Combined, that’s up to $600 billion in Nvidia-backed commitments tied to a single site.
Why does OpenAI need a guarantor to lease a data center? Because it doesn’t have the balance sheet to do it alone. OpenAI is projecting roughly $14 billion in losses for 2026 on about $25 billion in revenue — a negative 55% operating margin — which means it can’t get an investment-grade credit rating on its own. Lenders won’t finance hundreds of billions in construction debt against a company burning cash at that rate without someone with a stronger balance sheet standing behind it. Nvidia, sitting on enormous cash reserves and an even bigger incentive to keep OpenAI buying GPUs at scale, is that backstop.
The first phase — about 800 megawatts of the planned 10 gigawatts — is targeted for completion by 2028. Negotiations are ongoing and the terms could still change; Reuters has noted it couldn’t independently verify the WSJ’s figures.
This is the second Nvidia mega-deal to break this week, alongside the $500 billion SK Group partnership covering HBM4 memory and Vera Rubin data centers in South Korea. Together they show the same pattern: Nvidia isn’t just selling chips anymore, it’s financing the entire stack — the buildings, the power, and now the credit — needed to keep demand for those chips growing. Whether that’s prudent vendor financing or a sign that AI infrastructure spending has outrun what markets will fund on their own is the question investors are now asking heading into this week’s Big Tech earnings.