Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion of lease and debt financing so that OpenAI can take over a 10-gigawatt data-center campus being developed by SoftBank's energy arm, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Sunday and chased the same evening by Reuters.
What the guarantee would cover
The campus sits at Piketon, in southern Ohio, on the grounds of a former uranium-enrichment plant, and is being built by SB Energy. Nvidia's backstop would apply to the lease obligations and construction debt — the financial machinery that lets a landlord borrow against a tenant's promise to pay. The first phase, roughly 800 megawatts, is targeted for 2028.
Three numbers, and why they do not add up
Coverage is already stacking figures that describe different things. The $250 billion is the lease-and-debt guarantee and excludes the chips. Financing for OpenAI's chip purchases is a separate conversation worth up to $350 billion. The $500 billion-plus is the estimated total cost of the project including silicon. Summing any two of them produces a number nobody has reported.
Talks, not a deal
Reuters was explicit that it could not verify the terms independently. Nvidia and OpenAI both declined to comment, and OpenAI is described as being in advanced talks to lease rather than committed. Anthropic, Microsoft and Google have all raised the same site with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in recent weeks — the tenant is not settled.
Why OpenAI wants out of renting
Every gigawatt OpenAI runs today sits inside somebody else's cloud — Microsoft's, Amazon's or Oracle's. A direct lease on a campus of this size would be its first move toward controlling the physical layer, with the pricing and priority that implies.
The circularity problem
A chip vendor underwriting the rent of a customer whose purpose is to buy that vendor's chips converts Nvidia's demand forecast into Nvidia's balance-sheet risk. If OpenAI cannot pay, Nvidia owes the landlord — for a building full of Nvidia hardware.