Nvidia is negotiating a guarantee of roughly $250 billion to backstop OpenAI’s lease on a 10-gigawatt SoftBank campus in Piketon, Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report Sunday, with a parallel chip-financing arrangement of up to $350 billion also under discussion. The combined structure would push a single project’s committed capital past $500 billion, and it would route almost all of the risk through Nvidia’s balance sheet.
Markets read the structure immediately. Nvidia shares fell more than 4% on Monday, and credit-default swaps on its bonds recorded their largest intraday move, per ICE Data Services, since they began actively trading in November. That’s the tell: fixed-income desks, not equity holders, are the ones repricing.
The scale is the story. Nvidia’s most recent Q1 FY2027 10-Q caps maximum gross exposure across all partner facility lease guarantees at $3.5 billion, with $712 million held in escrow. A $250 billion guarantee is roughly 71 times that disclosed book. It exceeds fiscal-2026 revenue of $215.9 billion, and it’s about four times the $62.6 billion in cash and marketable securities Nvidia carried on its balance sheet at year-end January 25.
The site itself is heavy with symbolism. SB Energy broke ground March 20 at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which enriched uranium from 1954 until 2001. Phase one targets 800 megawatts at a cost of about $10 billion, completing around 2028, with the full 10-gigawatt campus targeted for the end of the decade. Japan’s $33 billion pledge toward a natural-gas plant under the trade deal, brokered with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, is meant to power it. Masayoshi Son gets his American gigafactory on federal land that once made bomb fuel.
The circular-financing question is now unavoidable. Nvidia has already put $30 billion into OpenAI, restructuring in February 2026 what began as a milestone-linked $100 billion letter of intent announced in September 2025. OpenAI’s projected compute spending through 2030 has been revised upward from about $600 billion to roughly $750 billion. The chip vendor is funding the customer that buys the chips, then guaranteeing the real estate that houses them. Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google are running their own capex cycles, but none has yet asked its silicon supplier to co-sign the lease.
Which is why the CDS move matters more than the equity drawdown. Equity holders are betting on a bigger TAM. Bondholders are being asked to underwrite a vendor-financing structure that has no obvious modern precedent at this scale, closer in spirit to the telecom vendor-financing loops of 1999–2001 than to any AI-era comparable. The Commerce Department gets its Ohio ribbon-cutting either way.
Sources
- https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-openai-softbank-data-center-ohio-financing-guarantee-250-billion-a1b2c3d4
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-26/nvidia-in-talks-on-250-billion-backing-for-openai-hub-wsj-says
- https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-talks-openai-guarantee-250-billion-financing-data-center-wsj-reports-2026-07-26/
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/nvidia-and-openai-in-talks-for-up-to-250-billion-dollar-ai-backstop.html
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/nvidia-weighs-250-billion-guarantee-so-openai-can-lease-softbanks-10-gigawatt-ohio-campus