Nvidia weighs $250 billion guarantee to bankroll OpenAI's Ohio mega-campus

The chipmaker that profits most from AI's buildout is now being asked to underwrite it, a sign of how thin the credit behind the industry's boom has become.

Nvidia is negotiating a financial guarantee of roughly $250 billion to help OpenAI lease a planned 10-gigawatt data center campus on a decommissioned uranium enrichment site in Piketon, Ohio, the Wall Street Journal reported. The guarantee would let OpenAI, which is not yet profitable and lacks an investment-grade credit rating of its own, secure favorable terms on the lease and construction debt; a separate, still-unfinished discussion could see Nvidia back up to $350 billion in financing for the chips that would fill the site. Including those chips, the full project could exceed $500 billion, which would make it the largest data center commitment announced to date, though terms have not been finalized and the deal could still fall apart.