Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion in financing for a massive OpenAI data center project in southern Ohio, the Wall Street Journal reported, in what would be among the largest infrastructure financing arrangements in the industry's history. The talks remain preliminary, and no agreement has been finalized.
What the guarantee covers
The $250 billion figure applies to the lease and construction financing for a 10-gigawatt data center that SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, is building in Piketon, Ohio — on the site of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, about 68 miles south of Columbus. It does not cover the Nvidia chips that would fill the facility; Nvidia is separately discussing up to $350 billion in additional financing for that hardware. Combined, the full buildout could exceed $500 billion, making it one of the largest data center projects ever announced. The first phase, sized at roughly 800 megawatts, is expected to be complete in 2028.
Why OpenAI wants to own the building
OpenAI has reportedly signed a potential 20-year lease giving it control over the facility and its equipment payments — a structure that would let the company own infrastructure outright rather than renting compute from Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft, its current cloud partners. The site's power will draw in part on a separate $33 billion U.S.-Japan agreement tied to a natural gas plant commitment. The arrangement follows a public-private model, with OpenAI's facility built on leased Department of Energy land.
Part of a broader financing wave
The Ohio talks surfaced within days of Nvidia and SK Group announcing a separate $500 billion-plus AI infrastructure partnership in South Korea, and as OpenAI works to reduce its own reliance on Nvidia hardware through projects like its custom Jalapeño chip built with Broadcom. OpenAI, which confidentially filed for a US IPO earlier this year, remains unprofitable despite a reported $852 billion valuation. New York has imposed a one-year moratorium on new data centers, and Al Jazeera reports more than a dozen other states have introduced similar bills as local pushback against the industry's power and water demands grows. A similar credit structure surfaced weeks later, when Anthropic’s $10 billion compute deal with Volta came with roughly $1.3 billion in letters of credit arranged by J.P. Morgan affiliates.
Reactor developers are raising against the same demand. Valar Atomics raised $1 billion at a $6 billion valuation in August to manufacture small modular reactors for data centers, though it does not yet hold an NRC commercial license.
Those domestic commitments dwarf Nvidia's China channel, where the first H200 shipments landed in August 2026 at roughly 10,000 chips each for ByteDance and Tencent.
Source: Yahoo Finance
Comments