Nvidia is in early-stage talks to provide up to $250 billion in financial guarantees to help OpenAI secure the lease on a 10-gigawatt data center campus in southern Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26, 2026. The deal, if finalized, would represent one of the largest single corporate financing commitments in technology industry history. Separately, Nvidia is also in discussions to back up to $350 billion in chip purchases for the same facility, bringing the chipmaker’s total potential exposure to $600 billion. For OpenAI, the arrangement would mark a decisive shift in strategy: moving the company from renting compute from cloud partners toward controlling its own infrastructure at a scale never before attempted.
What Was Announced
The planned data center sits on a decommissioned uranium enrichment facility approximately 50 miles south of Columbus, Ohio. SoftBank’s energy subsidiary, SB Energy, is developing the 10-gigawatt campus as part of the broader AI infrastructure buildout that has drawn commitments from the Japanese conglomerate, Oracle, and other major technology investors over the past year.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, Nvidia is negotiating to guarantee roughly $250 billion of financing that would cover OpenAI’s data center lease and associated debt. That figure does not include the cost of the Nvidia chips that would fill the facility. On top of the lease guarantee, the company is separately discussing backing up to $350 billion in chip purchases, which would give Nvidia a locked-in customer for its GPU production for years to come.
The total cost of the Ohio project, once chip procurement is factored in, could exceed $500 billion, making it the largest data center campus ever announced. The full facility, when built to its 10-gigawatt design capacity, would be equivalent in power draw to roughly 10 large nuclear reactors operating simultaneously.
Bloomberg and other outlets confirmed the WSJ reporting on July 26 and 27, citing sources familiar with the discussions. The talks are described as ongoing and not yet finalized. No binding agreements have been announced.
Technical Details
A 10-gigawatt compute campus represents an extraordinary leap in scale compared to existing hyperscale data centers, most of which operate in the range of tens to hundreds of megawatts. The first phase of the Ohio campus is expected to deliver approximately 800 megawatts of capacity by 2028, with subsequent phases scaling the facility toward its full design target over the following years.
Power is a central challenge for a project of this magnitude. The site’s power supply is controlled by the U.S. government, given its origins as federally managed uranium-enrichment infrastructure. To support the facility’s energy requirements, Japan agreed to invest $33 billion in a natural gas power plant on the federal land as part of its broader commitment to invest in the United States in exchange for reduced tariffs under a recent trade agreement. The energy infrastructure arrangement means the data center’s power supply is effectively tied to a geopolitical and trade framework between Washington and Tokyo.
Nvidia’s GPU hardware, likely successive generations of its Blackwell and future architectures, would densely populate the campus once chip procurement agreements are finalized. The scale of the facility implies interconnect infrastructure, cooling systems, and networking at levels that would push the boundaries of current engineering practice for concentrated AI compute deployment.
Industry Impact and Reactions
The most significant strategic implication of the deal, if it closes, is what it means for OpenAI’s relationship with its existing cloud partners. OpenAI currently relies on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle Cloud for the vast majority of its compute capacity. A self-owned, purpose-built campus of this scale would give OpenAI direct control over its infrastructure economics, reducing its dependence on third-party cloud pricing and capacity constraints. That shift would have material implications for Microsoft in particular, which holds a substantial stake in OpenAI and has been the company’s primary compute provider since 2019.
For Nvidia, the financing arrangement transforms the company from a chip supplier into something closer to a strategic financial partner. By guaranteeing the data center lease and potentially backing chip purchases, Nvidia is effectively underwriting OpenAI’s infrastructure roadmap in exchange for a guaranteed, long-term customer. Investor commentary noted the circular nature of the arrangement: Nvidia’s own chips are central to the demand that justifies the infrastructure, and Nvidia’s financing would enable the infrastructure that drives chip demand.
The scale of the Ohio project also reflects the broader industry trend toward hyperscale AI infrastructure commitments. In 2025 and 2026, leading AI companies and their financial backers announced trillions of dollars in aggregate infrastructure spending plans. The Ohio campus, at $500 billion and above, sits at the extreme end of that spectrum and is being closely watched as a signal of how seriously the largest players are treating long-term compute capacity as a competitive moat.
What Comes Next
The talks between Nvidia and OpenAI are ongoing, and no formal agreement has been announced. The first concrete milestone to watch is whether a binding financing commitment is reached and publicly disclosed, which would trigger a cascade of regulatory, permitting, and construction planning activity at the Ohio site. The 2028 target for the first 800-megawatt phase gives the project a roughly two-year runway for infrastructure preparation before meaningful compute capacity comes online.
The broader Stargate initiative, of which this Ohio campus is a centerpiece, has drawn scrutiny from analysts and policymakers regarding the concentration of AI infrastructure, the use of federal land, and the geopolitical entanglements that come with international energy financing. Congressional attention and potential export control considerations related to chip access at a government-adjacent site are factors that could shape the timeline and ultimate structure of any deal.
Conclusion
If the reported Nvidia-OpenAI financing agreement closes, it will mark a defining moment in the industrialization of artificial intelligence, one in which the infrastructure underpinning frontier AI systems is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars and involves sovereign governments, chip manufacturers, and energy producers as co-stakeholders. The Ohio campus would give OpenAI the compute independence it has long sought and give Nvidia an anchor customer whose demand could sustain the chipmaker’s production roadmap for the better part of a decade. The talks are still in progress, but the scale of what is being discussed makes this one of the most consequential infrastructure negotiations in the history of the technology industry.
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