Nvidia Is Backstopping $250 Billion of OpenAI's Data Centre Debt, and The Scale of This Has No Precedent.
The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26 that Nvidia is in talks to provide a roughly $250 billion financing guarantee for OpenAI as part of a 10-gigawatt data centre project that SoftBank's energy subsidiary is developing in southern Ohio. The project is expected to cost more than $500 billion in total once the chips inside are included, making it one of the largest infrastructure commitments in American history. Nvidia is also separately discussing financing OpenAI's chip purchases worth up to $350 billion.
Negotiations are in early stages and could change or collapse, but the scale of what is being contemplated tells you something important about where the AI infrastructure build is heading, and what it means for the companies approaching public markets in the next 12 months.
What Is Actually Being Proposed
The structure is worth understanding precisely. For OpenAI, a deal would be the first step toward controlling its own infrastructure instead of renting it from Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, while for Nvidia, it would guarantee demand for its chips for years to come.
The $250 billion Nvidia guarantee covers the data centre lease and debt financing but not the chips inside. OpenAI has no investment-grade credit rating as an unprofitable private company, which means lenders would require a creditworthy guarantor to finance a project at this scale. Nvidia, with its market capitalisation above $3 trillion, provides that guarantee and in exchange secures a captive buyer for its GPU output for years.
Anthropic, Microsoft and Google have also spoken to Commerce Secretary Lutnick in recent weeks about the project, suggesting this is not a bilateral OpenAI-Nvidia arrangement but part of a broader government-facilitated AI infrastructure effort. US AI infrastructure spending is set to top $700 billion this year according to Reuters.
The Circular Financing Question
Critics have flagged what they describe as circular financing: Nvidia invests in or guarantees its biggest customers, who use the money to buy Nvidia chips, which generates revenue that justifies the original investment. The concern is that this could lead to an overestimation of demand for Nvidia's chips.
The pattern is not new. Nvidia previously made a $250 million investment in CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents Nvidia GPUs, which was followed by a $6.3 billion deal where Nvidia agreed to purchase any unsold CoreWeave cloud computing capacity. It then picked up a $5 billion stake in Intel and made a $500 million investment in Nscale, followed by a $2.7 billion infrastructure commitment in the UK.
The Ohio project, if it closes at the numbers being reported, would be a different order of magnitude from any of those. A $250 billion guarantee from a single company for a single customer's data centre lease is not normal corporate finance. It is a structural commitment that ties Nvidia's balance sheet to OpenAI's infrastructure buildout in a way that has no real precedent in the technology industry.
What This Means for OpenAI's IPO
OpenAI is targeting a 2027 IPO at a $1 trillion valuation. The Ohio data centre deal, if completed, changes the story OpenAI can tell public market investors in a specific way: it shifts the company's positioning from a software and model company that rents compute from cloud providers, toward a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company that controls its own compute.
That reframing is strategically important. Companies that own their infrastructure rather than renting it typically command different valuation multiples, and the ability to control compute costs is a more defensible business model than one dependent on hyperscaler pricing. The $250 billion guarantee would also validate OpenAI's ability to access debt markets at scale despite its current unprofitability, which is one of the key concerns for institutional investors evaluating a trillion-dollar IPO valuation.
The timeline matters too. A 10-gigawatt data centre planned for 2028 operational delivery gives OpenAI a concrete infrastructure asset to point to in its S-1, even if the facility is not yet generating revenue at listing. For investors who backed OpenAI pre-IPO, the infrastructure commitment is a signal that the company is building for a 10-year horizon, not just the next model release cycle.
As we covered in ourpiece on how SpaceX split the AI IPO timeline for OpenAI and Anthropic, and theopen-weight competitive pressure from Kimi K3, the window between now and OpenAI's listing is where the most important variables are being set. A $250 billion infrastructure backstop from the world's most valuable chip company is one of them.
What This Means for Anthropic
Anthropic has also spoken to Lutnick about the Ohio project, which means the same government-facilitated infrastructure pipeline that Nvidia is backing for OpenAI is accessible to Anthropic. Anthropic is targeting an October 2026 listing, three to four months before OpenAI's 2027 timeline, and has already committed $21.6 billion to Australian data centre infrastructure, as we covered in ourpiece on that decision.
The Ohio story reinforces that infrastructure ownership is becoming a differentiator in how AI companies position for public markets. Anthropic's Australian data centre commitment and its conversations about the Ohio project suggest the same strategic logic: control the compute, control the cost structure, control the IPO narrative.
NonPublic Pty Ltd (ABN 49 607 216 928) holds Australian Financial Services Licence #482668. Investments are available to wholesale and sophisticated investors as defined under the Corporations Act 2001. This content is general in nature and does not constitute financial product advice. It does not take into account your objectives, financial situation, or needs. Investing in private markets involves significant risk, including the potential loss of your entire investment. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. You should obtain independent financial advice before making any investment decision.
