Nvidia is in talks to guarantee as much as $250 billion in lease obligations so OpenAI can rent SoftBank’s 10-gigawatt data center hub in Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Sunday, matched by Bloomberg the same night and confirmed by CNBC on Monday. The site is a $500 billion buildout that SoftBank is overseeing on the grounds of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which enriched uranium from 1954 until 2001. Ten gigawatts is roughly the annual power draw of 8 million American households.

The structural read is simple. OpenAI can’t sign a lease this large on its own credit, so Nvidia’s balance sheet becomes the credit score.

For scale: Nvidia’s Q1 FY2027 10-Q discloses a $3.5 billion maximum gross exposure cap across all of its partner facility lease guarantees. A $250 billion backstop would be roughly 71 times that book, more than a year of Nvidia revenue, and about four times its cash. Quartz reports the Journal also flagged a separate chip-financing arrangement that could reach $350 billion, on top of the $30 billion Nvidia has already put directly into OpenAI.

OpenAI gave up on building its own data centers last year and pivoted to leasing. The math on why is now visible: CNBC pegs OpenAI’s projected compute spend through 2030 at $750 billion, revised up from roughly $600 billion. No lessor writes that ticket against Anthropic-, Microsoft-, or Google-adjacent competition without a name-brand guarantor.

The Ohio site itself is a study in who’s actually paying. SB Energy broke ground on March 20 alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son. The U.S. government controls the electricity. Japan is funding the power buildout separately under a recent trade deal. SoftBank builds the shell. Nvidia guarantees the rent. OpenAI occupies the racks and buys the chips.

Every actor in the stack is underwriting a different actor’s risk, and the only entity whose credit ultimately anchors the tower is the one that sells the GPUs. That’s not a financing structure. It’s a closed loop, and Jensen Huang is standing at both ends of it.

Sources