NVIDIA is in discussions to provide a roughly $250 billion financial guarantee that would help OpenAI lease a planned 10-gigawatt AI data centre campus in southern Ohio in the US, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The proposed arrangement would support debt financing for the project, which is being developed by SoftBank (SB) Energy, and could ultimately cost more than $500 billion once NVIDIA's AI chips are included.
The guarantee would act as a credit backstop, allowing lenders to offer better financing terms even though OpenAI does not have an investment-grade credit rating. It would cover the lease and construction financing, but not the NVIDIA GPUs that will power the facility.
NVIDIA is also separately discussing financing for OpenAI’s chip purchases, which could total $350 billion, according to the report.
If completed, the Ohio campus would become the largest AI data centre project announced so far.
The first phase is expected to deliver around 800 MW of capacity by 2028, with the rest of the campus being built over the following years. The report said OpenAI has been in advanced talks to lease the site for several weeks, while Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have also shown interest.
The project is also tied to a broader US-Japan infrastructure initiative. Under a recent trade agreement, Japan committed $33 billion to fund a natural gas power project on federal land in Ohio that will supply electricity to the campus. Building the campus on federal land is expected to reduce permitting delays and local opposition that have slowed other large AI data centre projects across the US.
For OpenAI, the lease would mark its first dedicated data centre tenancy, reducing its reliance on cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle.
The company recently raised its projected spending on computing infrastructure to around $750 billion through 2030, up from an earlier estimate of roughly $600 billion. NVIDIA, meanwhile, is looking to secure long-term demand for its AI chips while expanding into infrastructure financing as AI data centre projects continue to grow in scale.
The latest project builds on the Stargate AI infrastructure initiative announced by OpenAI, SoftBank, MGX, and Oracle last year to develop AI computing capacity across the US. Arm, Microsoft, and NVIDIA were listed as technology partners for this project.
Since its launch, OpenAI has expanded Stargate beyond its flagship campus in Abilene, Texas, adding new sites with Oracle and SoftBank while increasing its projected computing spend to around $750 billion through 2030.
Earlier this year, OpenAI and SoftBank also invested $1 billion in data centre and power infrastructure venture SB Energy, with OpenAI signing an initial 1.2 GW data centre lease to support future Stargate deployments.
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