NVIDIA in talks to guarantee $250 billion in financing for OpenAI's $500+ billion AI datacenter project (Stargate)
The AI infrastructure race is approaching one of its biggest financing deals yet. NVIDIA is in discussions to provide financial guarantees worth approximately $250 billion to support OpenAI's plans to lease capacity at a massive AI data centre campus being developed in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal. The discussions remain ongoing with no final agreement announced.
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. 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.
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.
NVIDIA is also 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. 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.
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. 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.