NVIDIA is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees for OpenAI's planned data center campus in southern Ohio, according to the Wall Street Journal, cited by Reuters. The project is being developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary and is a 10-gigawatt facility sited on a decommissioned uranium-enrichment site about 50 miles south of Columbus, Ohio. The total cost, including chips, could exceed $500 billion making it the largest data center project announced to date. The financing structure would have NVIDIA backstop a set of lending instruments to reassure investors, which is necessary partly because OpenAI hasn't turned a profit and can't qualify for investment-grade credit on its own. The $250 billion commitment covers the lease and construction financing but not the chips. For those it seems that NVIDIA is also in talks to help fund OpenAI's chip purchases, a figure the WSJ puts at up to $350 billion. Remember that last year, OpenAI and NVIDIA teamed up on a huge project to set up 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems, the latter planning (at that time) to invest up to $100 billion into OpenAI.
For OpenAI the deal would be its first directly leased data center, reducing dependence on Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle for cloud infrastructure. The company has since raised its projected computing spend to around $750 billion through 2030. For NVIDIA, backing the project effectively locks in chip demand for years. Power for the site is controlled by the U.S. government and funded separately through a recent trade deal with Japan, which agreed to invest $33 billion in a natural gas plant on the federal land in exchange for lower tariffs. Power allocation is controlled by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all been in contact with him about the site. The first phase is expected to be completed in 2028 at around 800 megawatts. However, the terms of the deal are not final, and it could be scrapped.