En
EsNvidia Weighs $250B Backstop for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center
Nvidia is considering a $250 billion guarantee for an OpenAI data center in Ohio and may help finance a $350 billion chip order; its shares fell 4.5% Monday as credit insurance costs climbed.
Nvidia is evaluating a $250 billion guarantee to support financing for a planned OpenAI data center in southern Ohio, according to people familiar with the discussions. The backstop under review would enable the site's developer to raise debt on better terms than without an OpenAI-linked guarantor.
The company is also exploring a separate arrangement to help finance OpenAI's potential purchase of about $350 billion of Nvidia chips, those people indicated. Both transactions remain under discussion and are not finalized.
The Ohio facility is slated for a decommissioned uranium enrichment complex on federal land. The Commerce Department would oversee the power supply, which is planned to come from a Japanese-backed $33 billion natural-gas plant.
Shares of Nvidia fell 4.5% Monday. The cost of credit default swaps on its bonds, a form of investor protection against default, climbed during the session. ICE Data Services figures showed the sharpest intraday increase since active trading began in November.
In a separate announcement Monday, Nvidia agreed to invest in and partner with Safe Superintelligence, the new firm founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. The company described gaining 'rare access into the company's closely guarded research,' adding that the arrangement would allow the startup 'to increase its compute by an order of magnitude,' and that the two would 'collaborate on the technical advancement of NVIDIA's current and future compute platforms.'
Representatives for OpenAI and Nvidia did not immediately comment on the prospective financing and chip-purchase arrangements.
The southern Ohio data center is being developed by an affiliate of Japan's SoftBank, which sold its Nvidia stake in late 2025. The project is intended to provide computing capacity for OpenAI services such as ChatGPT.
Nvidia's market value is near $5 trillion, and recent margins have hovered around 75%, giving the company scope to consider large customer-linked financing structures.
