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Nvidia weighs $250 billion guarantee so OpenAI can lease SoftBank's 10-gigawatt Ohio campus, report claims — Nvidia also said to be discussing $350 billion deal to finance chips for the site
OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease SB Energy's 10 GW data center campus in Piketon, Ohio, with Nvidia in discussions to guarantee roughly $250 billion of the financing behind it, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The site would be OpenAI's first as a tenant rather than a customer of Microsoft, Amazon, or Oracle, and Nvidia is separately discussing financing the accelerators going inside, which could run to another $350 billion. Terms haven't been settled, and the arrangement could still collapse.
OpenAI has no investment-grade credit rating, and Nvidia's involvement would let SB Energy raise debt against Nvidia's balance sheet instead of its tenant's. Nvidia has already put $30 billion into OpenAI, which has raised its projected compute spending to around $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year, according to the Journal. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick controls allocation of the site's power, and Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all spoken to him about it in recent weeks.
Nvidia's Q1 FY2027 10-Q caps maximum gross exposure across all of its partner facility lease guarantees at $3.5 billion, shrinking as partners pay their lessors, with $712 million sitting in escrow against it. Nvidia took the guarantees in exchange for warrants and carries them as credit derivatives, describing their fair value as immaterial.
The first one, disclosed in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, was capped at $860 million with $470 million of escrow behind it. The partner separately contracted to sell the data center cloud capacity, and Nvidia retained the option to assume the lease for internal use or sublease it if the escrow and that contract came up short. Neither remedy has an obvious equivalent at a 10 GW campus on federal land.
Nvidia held $62.6 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities when fiscal 2026 closed on January 25, against full-year revenue of $215.9 billion and net income of $117 billion. A $250 billion guarantee works out at roughly 71 times the guarantee book Nvidia has disclosed, more than a year of revenue, and about four times its cash.
SB Energy broke ground at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant on March 20 alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Lutnick, and SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son. The site enriched uranium for the U.S. weapons program from 1954 until 2001 and is still being decontaminated. The Department of Energy had listed it among 16 federal sites opened to data center construction, and SB Energy leases the land rather than owning it. Powering the campus takes 9.2 GW of new natural gas generation plus $4.2 billion of transmission work with AEP Ohio, funded by $33.3 billion Japan committed under its trade agreement with the U.S. The first phase, roughly 800 MW, is expected in 2028.
Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
So OpenAI can't get a bank loan to lease the data centers it needs to produce the product it sells at a loss.
Nvidia can't have one of the main drivers of it's data center business hitting a brick wall in terms of growth and making it apparent this could happen to the other drivers of it's data center business so it is considering cosigning on a $250 billion loan that probably won't be repaid.
Nvidia has a pile of cash but not enough to cover these huge loans if they default. The 30 billion they already invested they could just write off and still be ok. Another 600 billion if it completely defaults would take even nvidia down.
More fake circular accounting going on here.
If they gamble right and OpenAI survives the AI bust they will be rich but if they don't someone else is going to be buying the rights to make GPU that used to be called nvidia.
