Nvidia is in talks to guarantee $250 billion in lease and construction financing for OpenAI’s planned 10-gigawatt data centre campus in Piketon, Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by Bloomberg, Reuters and Forbes. The backstop would sit alongside a separate package, reportedly reaching $350 billion, in which Nvidia would help finance the chip purchases feeding the same site.

The Piketon campus, roughly 50 miles south of Columbus, is being developed by SoftBank Group’s SB Energy on the grounds of a former uranium-enrichment facility. The Journal puts the full project cost above $500 billion, which would make it the largest data-centre undertaking announced to date. Phase one, around 800 megawatts, is targeted for completion in 2028.

The structure is the tell. OpenAI is valued at $852 billion but remains unprofitable and lacks an investment-grade credit rating, and it has raised projected compute spending through 2030 to roughly $750 billion. Nvidia, which has already put $30 billion into OpenAI, is now being asked to underwrite the debt its largest customer needs to buy Nvidia chips. Vendor financing, at industrial scale.

The site’s electricity is controlled by the U.S. government and funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal, tied to Tokyo’s $33 billion pledge for a natural-gas plant. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sits at the allocation choke point, and Anthropic, Microsoft and Google have all approached him about the same power.

People familiar told the Journal the talks are early and could collapse. Nvidia, OpenAI and the Commerce Department didn’t respond to Reuters. The lender-of-last-resort role once played by sovereigns in strategic build-outs is here being played by a chipmaker with an 80-plus percent gross margin and a customer it can’t afford to let fail.

Sources