OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walks through the Hart Senate Building after a meeting at the Capitol on June 3, 2026 in Washington.
Evelyn HochsteinReuter
OpenAI is in discussions with the following companies: Nvidia CNBC confirmed the up to $250 billion backstop to fund ambitious plans to lease massive new artificial intelligence data centers.
The backstop will allow OpenAI to use Nvidia’s credit to finance debt for a 10-gigawatt data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, said a person familiar with the discussions, who asked not to be identified because the details are confidential. The guarantee covers lease and construction debt and does not cover internal Nvidia chips, the people said, and the companies are in separate discussions.
Nvidia declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal first reported the talks on the $250 billion backstop.
This vast site in Ohio once functioned as a uranium enrichment plant. A gigawatt is a unit of electricity, and 10 gigawatts is roughly equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 8 million U.S. homes, according to a CNBC analysis of Energy Information Administration data. Construction costs for the data center campus could total more than $500 billion, officials said.
Negotiations over the site and its financing are ongoing and could still change, said another person familiar with the plans, who requested anonymity to protect confidentiality.
OpenAI sparked the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, and is a leading company for Anthropic, google, Amazon and meta. Together, these companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment to support their AI infrastructure ambitions.
Nvidia announced in September that it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a strategic partnership and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems. NVIDIA contributed $30 billion to OpenAI’s record-setting funding round that it closed in March, but the investment never materialized.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said “this may be the last time” the company invests in OpenAI before going public. OpenAI secretly filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but has not disclosed an official timeline for its debut.
OpenAI is currently valued at around $1 trillion by private investors who are betting that the company maintains its lead in the AI space and finds a viable business model in the long term, but faces increasing uncertainty as a number of open weight substitutes, primarily from China, threaten to undermine the company’s pricing power.
SoftBank and SB Energy are partnering with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a data center campus in Ohio. SoftBank is a major investor in OpenAI, and the two companies announced plans to invest $1 billion in SB Energy earlier this year.
—CNBC’s Kristina Partinevelos and Lora Kolodny contributed to this article
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