The artificial intelligence (AI) race could be heading towards one of its biggest financing deals yet.
NVIDIA is in discussions to provide financial guarantees worth around $250 billion to support OpenAI’s plans to lease capacity at a massive AI data centre campus being developed in the US, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
The discussions are ongoing and no final agreement has been announced.
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A Financing Plan to Support a Giant AI Data Centre
The proposed guarantee would help OpenAI secure financing for a 10-gigawatt data centre project being built in southern Ohio by SoftBank’s energy subsidiary.
Lenders are expected to offer better borrowing terms if Nvidia backs the project, as OpenAI does not hold an investment-grade credit rating.
According to the report, the guarantee would cover financing linked to leasing the facility rather than purchasing NVIDIA’s AI chips. The entire project, including computing hardware, could eventually cost more than $500 billion, making it one of the largest AI infrastructure investments ever planned.
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OpenAI Shifts Towards Owning AI Infrastructure
The move reflects OpenAI’s broader strategy to gain greater control over the computing infrastructure needed to train and run advanced AI models.
Until now, the ChatGPT maker has relied heavily on cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle for computing capacity.
The report also said NVIDIA is discussing a separate arrangement that could support up to $350 billion in financing for OpenAI’s future chip purchases. The first phase of the Ohio campus is expected to deliver around 800 megawatts of power by 2028.
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Government Support and Growing AI Infrastructure Race
Power for the project is linked to a site overseen by the US government and funded separately under a recent US-Japan trade agreement, with Japan investing $33 billion in a natural gas power plant to support the development, according to the report.
Other AI companies, including Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, have reportedly shown interest in the site as demand for AI computing capacity continues to rise.
If completed, the project would underline the scale of investment now flowing into AI infrastructure as technology companies compete to secure the computing power needed for next-generation AI models.
The reported talks highlight how competition in AI is increasingly shifting from building smarter models to securing the infrastructure that powers them. Financing, electricity and data centre capacity are rapidly becoming as strategically important as AI chips themselves.
Samarjit Kaur is a journalist and communications professional covering technology & emerging digital trends. With a focus on clarity and context, she reports on developments shaping industries and governance. When not reporting, she chooses to plug-in and relax on her playlists and plan her next bucket-list trips!
