Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion in financing that would let OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt data center campus in southern Ohio, the Wall Street Journal reported on July 27. The campus, under development by SoftBank-backed SB Energy on 3,700 acres of federal land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, a Cold War uranium-enrichment site shut down in 2001, would be the largest data center project announced anywhere, with total costs including chips that could exceed $500 billion.
Under the arrangement being discussed, OpenAI would sign a 20-year lease, with rental payments expected to reach tens of billions of dollars over the term and a first phase of 800 megawatts targeted for 2028. Nvidia would backstop the lending instruments behind the lease and construction, reassurance investors require because OpenAI does not turn a profit and cannot raise investment-grade debt on its own. Nvidia is separately discussing financing of as much as $350 billion for the chips that would fill the campus.
At full build-out, the site’s 10 gigawatts would draw roughly the power of 8 million US households, more than three times the 3.2 gigawatts committed to OpenAI’s Project Camellia campus in Georgia and larger than any single campus in the current hyperscaler pipeline. It would be the largest individual commitment within the $750 billion compute budget OpenAI projected through 2030.
The arrangement would be vendor financing at a scale the technology industry has not seen: Nvidia guaranteeing loans so that its largest customer can lease a facility to be filled with Nvidia chips. The structure concentrates the AI buildout’s credit risk on Nvidia’s balance sheet, and it extends a pattern already visible as AI compute becomes a private credit asset class, with capital requirements that have outgrown what banks and bond markets will carry on conventional terms.
Reported plans call for around 9.2 gigawatts of new gas generation capacity to serve the campus, a substantial addition in a grid environment where hyperscalers were already projected to spend $600 billion this year against binding power constraints. Legacy federal nuclear complexes such as the Piketon site come with transmission infrastructure, land, and existing regulatory relationships that greenfield projects lack.
No agreement has been signed, and the terms under discussion could change or fall apart. If completed, the arrangement would be the largest data center financing on record, with the 800-megawatt first phase due to begin operating in 2028.
Sources: CNBC, Tom’s Hardware, TechPowerUp
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team