Nvidia is in discussions to provide $250 billion in funding guarantees that would allow OpenAI to lease what could become the worlds largest AI data center, a 10-gigawatt facility under construction in Piketon, Ohio, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
The deal represents one of the most ambitious infrastructure commitments in the technology sector and signals the extraordinary capital demands of the artificial intelligence arms race. The Ohio project, being built by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, on land leased through a public-private partnership with the US Department of Energy, could ultimately cost more than $500 billion when including the value of chips that would power the site.
Under the proposed arrangement, Nvidia would guarantee the lease payments for the facility. The chips destined for the data center, valued at an additional $350 billion, remain a separate matter that Nvidia has said it is also negotiating. The project is expected to deliver as much as 800 megawatts of electricity by 2028, enough to power roughly 640,000 homes. That power would come from a separate $33 billion US government deal with Japan for a natural gas plant.
OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, has been rapidly expanding its computing capacity. The ChatGPT maker signed a potential 20-year lease for the Ohio facility in June, according to The Information. The deal would shift OpenAI away from its current practice of renting server capacity from cloud giants including Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft, giving it greater control over its own infrastructure.
However, analysts have raised concerns about the financial structure of the arrangement and what it reveals about the AI industry more broadly. Aleksandar Tomic, associate dean at Boston College, described the deal as the latest example of circular financing across the AI sector, where capital circulates among a small group of companies without clear evidence of end-customer demand.
Tomic noted that in 2025 alone, OpenAI committed to buying $250 billion of cloud services from Microsoft, one of its major backers. Nvidia itself pledged $100 billion to OpenAI in 2025 for data center construction and another $30 billion in early 2026. The result, Tomic argued, is that the same capital passes through multiple companies, appearing as revenue at each stage, echoing the dynamics that preceded the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s.
The question is why such a deal is necessary if demand for AI services is as robust as companies claim, Tomic said. If everything is running at full speed, why would Nvidia need to juice demand for its chips in this particular way?
Others see the arrangement more favorably. Michael Monaghan, founder of Founders ETF, argued that the transactions represent a normal economy rather than problematic circularity. Companies buy services from each other, and those providers reinvest that capital, he said, comparing it to routine economic exchange.
Nvidias stock fell 4.9 percent in midday trading following the announcement, suggesting that investors share some of the skepticism about the deals implications. The selloff hints at broader unease about the sustainability of AI-related capital expenditure growth, which has driven much of the technology sectors rally over the past two years.
The Ohio facility is part of a broader boom in data center construction that has made the state home to the fourth-largest concentration of operational data centers in the United States, behind Virginia, Texas and California. Ohio currently hosts 166 active data centers with another 57 planned. The buildout has drawn political backlash, with several US states proposing bans on new data center construction over concerns about energy consumption and environmental impact.
— Pulse Of Nations Wire Desk