Nvidia has entered discussions to underwrite financing worth as much as $250 billion for a sprawling data center campus in Ohio built to serve OpenAI, according to multiple reports citing people familiar with the negotiations. The proposed facility, said to be tied to the broader Stargate infrastructure push backed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, is described as a roughly 10-gigawatt site that would rank among the largest AI computing campuses ever attempted, with the surrounding project’s total cost expected to run well beyond $500 billion once construction, power infrastructure and chip purchases are tallied.
The size of the figure being discussed has shifted as talks have progressed. While early reporting pointed to a guarantee approaching a quarter-trillion dollars, subsequent accounts describe a narrower arrangement in which Nvidia would commit roughly $105 billion toward financing the buildout, a sign that the terms remain fluid and subject to negotiation between the two companies. People close to the discussions caution that any final structure could still change before an agreement is signed.
Details of exactly how Nvidia’s backing would work have not been fully settled publicly. Reports suggest the arrangement could involve Nvidia guaranteeing debt or lease obligations tied to the campus, effectively making it easier for OpenAI and its infrastructure partners to raise the capital needed for construction and power generation, while Nvidia’s chips would ultimately fill much of the completed facility.
That structure has revived long-running concerns about so-called circular financing in the AI industry, in which chipmakers extend investment, credit or guarantees to the very customers that in turn spend the money on those chipmakers’ hardware. Critics argue the pattern can inflate apparent demand and obscure the underlying economics of the AI buildout. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has pushed back on that framing in public remarks, characterizing the company’s arrangements with OpenAI as reflecting genuine, enormous compute demand rather than an artificial funding loop.
Neither Nvidia nor OpenAI has publicly confirmed final terms of the Ohio arrangement, and both companies have historically declined to detail the specifics of financing talks before deals are formally signed. The project adds to a fast-growing list of multibillion-dollar commitments underpinning OpenAI’s infrastructure ambitions as it races to secure the computing capacity it says is needed to keep pace with demand for its AI models.