Nvidia is in talks to back OpenAI's Ohio data center with $250 billion in financing

The backstop would enable OpenAI to lease a 10-gigawatt facility that SB Energy, SoftBank's power subsidiary, is building in southern Ohio. The project is sited on a decommissioned uranium-enrichment facility roughly 50 miles south of Columbus, and the full cost — including chips — could exceed $500 billion, making it the largest data center project announced to date.

The proposed arrangement would have Nvidia stand behind a set of financing instruments designed to reassure lenders about the solidity of the project's funding. Such backing is needed partly because OpenAI has not yet turned a profit and therefore cannot obtain an investment-grade credit rating on its own. Terms have not been finalized and the deal could fall apart.

Under the terms being discussed, the $250 billion commitment would apply to the lease and construction financing, leaving the cost of the chips themselves outside its scope. In a parallel negotiation, Nvidia is also in talks to help fund OpenAI's acquisition of chips, a figure the Journal said could reach $350 billion. Nvidia has already invested $30 billion in OpenAI.

The power for the project is controlled by the U.S. government and funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is involved in deciding which companies will receive access to that power. In March, Secretary Lutnick, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright broke ground on the complex.

Japan agreed to invest $33 billion in a natural-gas power project on the federal land as part of its commitment to invest in the U.S. in exchange for lower tariffs. The two countries would share proceeds from power sales until Japan recovers its outlay, at which point Washington's share would rise to 90 percent.

The first phase of the project is expected to be completed in 2028 with around 800 megawatts of power. At full scale, the campus would require roughly 10 gigawatts of electricity. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft $MSFT, and Google $GOOGL have all spoken with Secretary Lutnick about the site.

The Ohio project would mark OpenAI's first time leasing a data center directly, reducing its dependence on cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon $AMZN, and Oracle $ORCL. OpenAI has raised its projected spending on computing infrastructure to around $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year. The company separately announced plans to build its first wholly owned data center in Effingham County, Georgia, committing $20 billion to that project.