NVIDIA is said to be preparing to chip in a significant amount of its own money for the biggest spender of its customer.
NVIDIA is currently negotiating the financing guarantees for OpenAI worth approximately $250 billion, according to a report by Wall Street Journal on Sunday. The backing comes from a massive data center project the ChatGPT creator is developing to lease.
The $250 billion guarantee is for the data center lease and debt financing. It would not include the actual NVIDIA chips themselves that would be used inside the facility.
NVIDIA is separately negotiating $350 billion in financing OpenAI chip orders, according to a report. Together, it makes NVIDIA potential exposure approaching half a trillion dollars for their infrastructure buildout with OpenAI.
The data center is under construction in the U.S. by SoftBank Group energy arm and is a 10-gigawatt AI campus in southern Ohio. The entire project could end up costing over $500 billion, according to Bloomberg.
OpenAI may not have an investment-grade credit rating yet, its promise would enable the firm to be able to get better financing terms for the lease. The backing is supposed to allay lenders fears that the project is financially secure.
The project first phase is expected to be completed by 2028, delivering around 800 megawatts of power. The power supply is operated by the U.S. government and the fact that Japan is funding it separately is linked to Tokyo promise of $33 billion investment in a natural gas plant in a recent trade deal.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick of the United States is allegedly in charge of determining who will get the use of that power capacity. OpenAI is said to be in advanced negotiations for weeks to lease the premises.
It is not one company that is interested, either. The report says that in recent weeks, the three Anthropic, Microsoft and Google have met with Lutnick regarding the same site.
NVIDIA, OpenAI and the U.S. Commerce Department have not responded to requests for comment about the report. The negotiations are a preliminary stage, with terms yet to be finalized or possible deal collapse.
The partnership between NVIDIA and OpenAI is nothing new for NVIDIA. The two firms inked a deal in September 2025, in which NVIDIA agreed to invest as much as $100 billion in non-voting shares of OpenAI, and to provide at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems beginning in 2026.
NVIDIA is already leasing up to five million chips to OpenAI, through a separate deal, valued at $350 billion, for the training of the next generation of OpenAI AI models. Those chips are a key component of OpenAI overall expansion in the United States.
Investors haven’t been oblivious to these circular deals. In the latest report, prominent short seller Michael Burry took to social media, calling it a sort of NVIDIA “guaranteeing” $200 billion worth of “spending” by ChatGPT on NVIDIA chips.
Analysts have echoed those worries, citing NVIDIA assertion that it guarantees loans to its largest customer, which “mixes the supplier and financial backstop. This cycle of financing, in which the same firms that are fueling the growth of AI also find themselves indirectly financing each other bets, is increasingly under the microscope, much like the companies that are buying up Nvidia stock price. The practice of the same companies funding AI growth indirectly is gaining more attention than it deserves, just like the companies that have been acquiring Nvidia stock price.
News was greeted with a wait-and-see attitude in markets. NVIDIA stock fell slightly in early trading following the report, as lower trading volumes reflected the uncertainty of the implications of these increasingly complicated financing arrangements for long-term risk.
The agreement also comes as part of a much bigger trend in the industry for investment in data center infrastructure and buildout over the next few years; industry spending on data center infrastructure and buildout is projected to exceed $700 billion in 2026. If the deal between NVIDIA and OpenAI does seal, it is a testament to the extent of financial dependency between chipmakers, AI labs and cloud suppliers.
