Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion in financing behind a massive Ohio data center that OpenAI wants to lease, according to a Wall Street Journal report relayed by outlets including Proactive, Crain's Cleveland Business and Tom's Hardware.
The site is a 10-gigawatt campus in Piketon, Ohio, tied to SoftBank's SB Energy, and Tom's Hardware reports OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease it. Bloomberg and The Hindu BusinessLine put the overall project at about $500 billion, with computing there slated for 2028. Tom's Hardware adds that Nvidia is separately discussing a roughly $350 billion arrangement to finance chips for the site.
What makes this unusual is the role reversal. Nvidia sells the chips that go into these buildings; here it would be underwriting a customer's ability to pay for them. Benzinga summed it up bluntly: Nvidia's next product could be credit, not chips. A guarantee means Nvidia would be on the hook if OpenAI could not meet the lease obligations.
Markets noticed both the promise and the exposure. Bloomberg reported that the cost of protecting Nvidia's debt against default surged by the most on record on Monday, following reports the company is in conversations covering more than $750 billion of AI deals. Meanwhile, Stocktwits reported that shares of AI cloud providers CoreWeave and Nebius climbed, with one analyst calling the guarantee a "constructive" signal. Investor Michael Burry, a longtime skeptic of circular AI deal-making, responded, "Around and Around We Go," per Yahoo Finance.
There is a government layer, too. According to the WSJ report summarized by MSN, the power for the project is controlled by the US government and funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick involved in deciding who gets it.
Why it matters: the AI build-out has grown so expensive that chipmakers are now guaranteeing their customers' bills, which ties one company's balance sheet to the whole sector's bet paying off.