Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly 250 billion dollars in financing so OpenAI can lease a 10 gigawatt data center campus being built on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio. The full project could cost more than 500 billion dollars, and Nvidia is separately discussing another 350 billion dollars in financing to cover OpenAI's chip purchases for the same campus. Add it together and one company may be underwriting up to 600 billion dollars in commitments for its single biggest customer.
The Wall Street Journal broke the story on July 26, citing people familiar with the discussions, and both Bloomberg and Reuters have since confirmed talks are underway, though neither company has made the arrangement official. Negotiations are described as early stage and could still fall apart or change materially before anything is signed.
Why OpenAI needs a guarantor
OpenAI does not carry an investment grade credit rating, which makes borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars on its own far more expensive, if lenders agree to it at all. Nvidia's guarantee would let OpenAI secure financing on terms closer to what an established, creditworthy company could get, essentially lending its balance sheet strength to a partner it has every reason to keep growing.
The Ohio campus itself is being developed by SB Energy, the energy subsidiary of SoftBank Group, with its first 800 megawatt phase targeted for completion by 2028. Power for the site is expected to come from a natural gas facility backed by a 33 billion dollar Japanese investment tied to a recent US-Japan trade agreement. Microsoft, Google and Anthropic have all reportedly expressed interest in the same site, underscoring how scarce large-scale power and land for AI infrastructure has become.
The circular financing question nobody has answered
Critics have flagged this arrangement as a version of circular financing, where a chipmaker effectively bankrolls its own biggest customer's ability to keep buying its chips. Investor Michael Burry, who has been publicly skeptical of AI infrastructure spending, reacted to the report by describing it as Nvidia guaranteeing 200 billion dollars of its own customer's spending on Nvidia hardware. The concern is not new. Nvidia has already committed up to 100 billion dollars directly into OpenAI through non-voting shares as part of an earlier agreement, and this new financing talk would sit on top of that.
"Around and around we go," Burry wrote, reacting to the report.
Supporters of the arrangement argue that AI compute demand is real and growing regardless of who finances it, and that Nvidia guaranteeing debt is fundamentally different from Nvidia directly funding purchases, since a guarantee only costs Nvidia money if OpenAI actually defaults. Skeptics counter that piling guarantee on top of equity investment on top of chip supply agreements makes it increasingly hard to tell whether underlying demand justifies the spending or whether the numbers are being inflated by the same small group of companies trading capital back and forth.
What this means for India
India is not a direct party to this specific financing arrangement, but the scale of it matters for how global AI infrastructure investment gets allocated over the next several years. Every dollar of compute capacity that Nvidia and OpenAI lock into a single Ohio campus is capacity that becomes less available, or more expensive, for AI labs and cloud providers elsewhere, including Indian companies that rely on the same global GPU supply chain.
There is also a governance angle worth watching. Indian regulators have generally avoided the kind of circular-financing scrutiny that has started in the US, but Reliance Jio, Tata and other Indian conglomerates making their own multi-billion dollar AI infrastructure bets will likely study how Nvidia structures deals like this one, since similar financing tools, chip suppliers guaranteeing customer debt, could eventually show up in India's own AI buildout as domestic players seek financing for large data center projects.
What to watch
Whether this deal actually closes, and on what terms, is the immediate thing to watch, since talks this large frequently shift before signing. Beyond that, watch how credit rating agencies and antitrust regulators respond if the arrangement is finalized, since a guarantee of this size sitting on Nvidia's balance sheet, tied to a single customer's ability to pay, is the kind of concentration risk regulators have historically taken seriously once it becomes concrete rather than hypothetical.
Published July 27, 2026. Gadgets365 will update this article as more information becomes available.
