Nvidia May Guarantee $250 Billion So OpenAI Can Buy Nvidia Chips

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion of financing so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt data centre campus in southern Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report confirmed by multiple outlets on July 27. Separately, the two are reportedly discussing up to $350 billion more to finance the chips that would fill it.

Read that structure again, because it is the story: the company selling the chips would be vouching for the creditworthiness of the company buying them. Nothing is signed — these are reported negotiations — but the shape alone is remarkable.

What's on the table

Item	Detail
Nvidia's guarantee	~$250 billion, backstopping lease and construction financing
Separate chip financing	Reportedly up to $350 billion more
The site	10 GW campus ~50 miles south of Columbus, Ohio, on a decommissioned uranium-enrichment site
Developer / landlord	SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary — OpenAI would lease, not own
Total project cost	Could exceed $500 billion including chips — the largest data centre project announced anywhere
Power	Government-controlled land; a $33bn natural gas plant funded through a Japan trade deal in exchange for lower tariffs
Status	Reported talks. Not announced, not signed.

Why a guarantee is needed at all

This is the part that explains everything else. OpenAI is not profitable and cannot qualify for investment-grade credit on its own. Lenders financing a quarter-trillion-dollar lease want an investment-grade counterparty standing behind it. Nvidia — one of the most valuable and cash-generative companies on earth — can be that counterparty.

So Nvidia's balance sheet would be doing the work OpenAI's cannot, to build a facility whose primary purpose is to house Nvidia hardware. For OpenAI the payoff is real: it would be its first directly leased data centre, cutting its dependence on Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle for capacity. For Nvidia, it locks in years of chip demand at a scale no ordinary purchase order could.

Vendor financing, at a scale we haven't seen

This isn't new behaviour, it's an escalation of it. Chipmakers have been underwriting their own customers all year — but the magnitudes are not comparable.

Deal	Supplier's commitment	Form
AMD → Anthropic (July 22)	Up to $5 billion	Equity investment alongside a 2 GW deployment
Nvidia's equity bets	~$40 billion	Stakes across OpenAI, IREN, Corning and others
Nvidia → OpenAI (reported)	Up to ~$600 billion combined	Debt guarantee plus chip financing

AMD taking a $5 billion equity position in Anthropic looked aggressive five days ago. The Nvidia arrangement under discussion is roughly two orders of magnitude larger, and it is structurally different: equity means you own part of the upside, while a guarantee means you absorb the downside if the customer can't pay.