Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion of debt so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt data center campus in Piketon, Ohio, from SoftBank’s SB Energy, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The chipmaker is separately discussing financing the accelerators that would fill the site, a bill that could reach another $350 billion. If the structure holds, it would let SB Energy borrow against Nvidia’s balance sheet rather than OpenAI’s, useful because OpenAI carries no investment-grade credit rating. The arrangement is still fluid and could collapse.
The guarantee math does not resemble the disclosed book
Nvidia’s Q1 FY2027 10-Q caps maximum gross exposure across all partner facility lease guarantees at $3.5 billion, shrinking as partners pay their lessors, with $712 million sitting in escrow. The first such guarantee, disclosed in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, was capped at $860 million with $470 million of escrow behind it. A $250 billion commitment would run roughly 71 times the current guarantee ceiling, exceed a full year of Nvidia’s $215.9 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue, and dwarf the $62.6 billion in cash, equivalents, and marketable securities the company held when the year closed on January 25. Nvidia carries the existing guarantees as credit derivatives and describes their fair value as immaterial.
The campus runs on federal land and Japanese capital
SB Energy broke ground at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant on March 20 alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son. The site enriched uranium for the U.S. weapons program from 1954 until 2001 and is still being decontaminated. The Department of Energy listed it among 16 federal sites opened to data center construction; SB Energy leases the land rather than owning it. Powering the campus requires 9.2 gigawatts of new natural gas generation plus $4.2 billion of transmission work with AEP Ohio, funded by $33.3 billion Japan committed under its trade agreement with the United States. The first phase, roughly 800 megawatts, is expected in 2028.
OpenAI’s compute bill keeps rising
OpenAI has raised its projected compute spending to around $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year, according to the Journal. Nvidia has already put $30 billion into the company. OpenAI gave up on building its own data centers last year in favor of leasing capacity, making it a tenant rather than a customer of Microsoft, Amazon, or Oracle for the first time. SoftBank, meanwhile, carries more than $130 billion of debt while funding buildouts in Ohio, France, and elsewhere.
Lutnick controls the power queue
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick controls allocation of the site’s power, and Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all spoken to him about it in recent weeks. The existing guarantee structure gave Nvidia the option to assume a partner’s lease for internal use or sublease it if escrow and a cloud-capacity sales contract came up short. Neither remedy has an obvious equivalent at a 10-gigawatt campus on federal land. Terms have not been settled, and the Journal’s sources caution the arrangement could still collapse.