Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion in financing for OpenAI as part of a massive data center project, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Sunday and picked up by Reuters on July 26.
The money would not be a straightforward investment. It would be a backstop — a guarantee that makes lenders comfortable putting up cash, because Nvidia would stand behind the debt if things went wrong. According to the WSJ, the guarantees would help OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt project being developed in southern Ohio by an energy subsidiary of SoftBank.
Ten gigawatts is an enormous amount of electricity, and the power arrangement is unusual. The WSJ reports the power for the project is controlled by the US government and funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal, with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick involved in deciding who gets it. That puts a private computing project squarely inside government and trade policy.
The reported deal would ripple outward. Yahoo Finance noted that Oracle shares jumped overnight on the news, since the arrangement would help Oracle as well. One outlet, finance.biggo.com, framed the total scale of the effort as approaching $500 billion. Coverage from Benzinga noted that investor Michael Burry weighed in on the reported structure.
Nothing is signed. Every account traces back to the same WSJ story, which cites unnamed sources and describes talks, not a completed agreement.
Why it matters: the AI boom is increasingly financed by the same handful of companies that sell into it — here, the leading chipmaker would be underwriting its biggest customer's ability to buy more chips — and this deal shows that building AI at national scale now depends on government-controlled power and foreign money, not just private capital.