Nvidia is discussing a roughly $250 billion financial guarantee to help OpenAI lease a massive 10-gigawatt data center that SoftBank's energy arm is building in southern Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The backstop would cover the lease and construction debt, not the chips themselves.
The Ohio campus is expected to reach an initial 800 megawatts by 2028, with the full project — including Nvidia hardware — projected to cost more than $500 billion, making it the largest data center undertaking announced to date. Nvidia, which has already invested $30 billion in OpenAI, is separately discussing financing up to $350 billion in chip purchases for the same buildout.
Power for the site is controlled by the U.S. government and tied to a recent trade deal with Japan, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick involved in allocating it. Microsoft, Google and Anthropic have also reportedly expressed interest in the site, underscoring how scarce power capacity — not just chips — has become the bottleneck for AI infrastructure.