Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion of the debt OpenAI needs to build a data center in Piketon, Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report Sunday later confirmed by Reuters and CNBC. The chipmaker’s balance sheet, in effect, would underwrite the credit of its largest customer.
The Piketon site, about 50 miles south of Columbus, is planned for 10 gigawatts of power at full build-out, an amount CNBC likens to the annual electricity consumption of eight million American households. Full-scale construction is estimated to cost more than $500 billion. The first phase, around 800 megawatts, is expected to come online in 2028, with SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy handling development. Bloomberg reports the Nvidia guarantee would let SB Energy raise debt on materially better terms, and marks OpenAI’s first move to control its own compute infrastructure rather than rent it from Microsoft, Amazon, or Oracle.
Markets noticed the shape of it immediately. Nvidia shares fell 4.5 percent in late morning trading Monday, and credit-default swaps on Nvidia bonds recorded their largest intraday move since the instruments began actively trading in November, per ICE Data Services figures cited by Bloomberg. The Journal separately reports discussions of up to $350 billion more in financing arrangements tied to chip purchases. Bloomberg puts Nvidia’s total outstanding AI commitments, including a partnership with South Korea’s SK Group, at roughly $750 billion.
That’s the number that revived the phrase Wall Street last used seriously in 2000: circular financing. Nvidia already holds $30 billion in OpenAI equity. It’s now negotiating to guarantee the debt that’ll pay for the buildings that’ll house the chips it sells to the company it owns a stake in. OpenAI, valued near $1 trillion by private investors, has quietly revised its projected infrastructure spending through 2030 from $600 billion to roughly $750 billion.
The political scaffolding is already in place. Japan has committed $33 billion toward a natural gas plant on the Piketon site under a bilateral trade agreement, and in recent weeks Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google approached Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about access to the same acreage. OpenAI, per the Journal, is the most advanced.
The lesson of the 2000 telecom buildout wasn’t that the fiber went unused. It was that the vendors who financed their customers ended up owning the collateral when the customers couldn’t pay. Nvidia is now the vendor, the shareholder, and the guarantor of the same counterparty.