OpenAI wants to build a data center the size of ten nuclear reactors. The problem isn't securing the land or the chips — it's that no bank will lend that amount of money without someone more creditworthy co-signing. That guarantor, increasingly, is Nvidia.
Nvidia is in preliminary talks to provide up to $250 billion in financing guarantees that would let OpenAI lease compute capacity from a $500 billion, 10-gigawatt data center campus led by SoftBank in southern Ohio. The 10GW site sits on the former Portsmouth uranium enrichment site in Pike County, developed by SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy. The first phase, 800 megawatts, is planned for 2028.
The reason for this structure is concrete: OpenAI doesn't have an investment-grade credit rating of its own. Nvidia's backing would let lenders on the project's financing vehicles assess the debt's risk against Nvidia's balance sheet, not OpenAI's — in practice, Nvidia lends its creditworthiness so the project can secure financing on terms OpenAI couldn't obtain on its own.
This backstop adds to already considerable exposure: Nvidia invested $30 billion directly in OpenAI, and separately is in talks to help finance up to $350 billion in chip sales to the company. Backstop negotiations remain ongoing and could change in shape and size before closing.
This kind of structure — the hardware provider guaranteeing its own biggest customer's debt — is a signal worth watching closely: it indicates the traditional debt market is no longer willing to finance AI infrastructure expansion at this scale without additional guarantees, and that Nvidia's financial health is increasingly intertwined with its largest customers', not just as a supplier but as a de facto guarantor of their growth.
Carlos Montiel is an enterprise AI solutions architect. He implements LLMs, Agents, RAG, and orchestrators for companies across Guatemala and Latin America. Reach out for a consultation.
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