Nvidia is scaling back the financial guarantee it had considered providing for OpenAI’s massive Ohio data-center project, reducing its initial exposure from a previously discussed $250 billion as investors scrutinize how aggressively the chipmaker is using its balance sheet to support the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom.
Nvidia Would Back Only the First Phase
The restructuring does not mean Nvidia is abandoning the Ohio project.
The Wall Street Journal said the chipmaker would initially backstop approximately half of the planned multi-hundred-billion-dollar development under the revised financing structure.
Reuters reported that Nvidia’s financial guarantee would apply only to the project’s first phase and that an agreement could be signed as early as the weekend.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is still contemplating a much larger commitment.
Reuters said OpenAI continues to discuss a binding lease covering the entire 10-gigawatt Ohio development, which is being built by SB Energy, a subsidiary of Japan’s SoftBank. If completed at its proposed scale, Reuters said it would be the largest data-center project announced to date.
Investor Concerns Push Nvidia to Reduce Risk
The reduced guarantee reflects growing scrutiny of the financial risks surrounding the AI infrastructure race.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the change was designed to address investor concerns over Nvidia’s exposure as the company increasingly uses its balance sheet to help support demand for its AI chips. The Journal noted that Nvidia shares fell 5% after it previously disclosed discussions surrounding the potential $250 billion backstop.
Investor concerns about Nvidia’s exposure to large financing commitments helped prompt the revised structure.
The issue is particularly important because financing has become a central part of the AI expansion. Chipmakers and AI developers increasingly need not only processors but also enormous amounts of capital for buildings, electricity, cooling systems and networking infrastructure.
Nvidia Is Simultaneously Pursuing $500 Billion Financing Push
The Ohio revision comes only days after Nvidia announced a much broader effort to bring Wall Street capital into AI infrastructure.
Reuters reported that Nvidia partnered on August 10 with six major financial institutions to establish compute-financing platforms intended to raise more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.
That strategy could allow Nvidia to support customers’ expansion without carrying the entire financial burden itself. The revised Ohio arrangement points in the same direction: Nvidia remains willing to help secure financing, but the company appears to be limiting how much risk it directly guarantees at the beginning of an extraordinarily large project.
OpenAI’s $852 Billion Valuation Meets Infrastructure Reality
The Ohio campus also highlights the financial challenge facing OpenAI as it moves toward greater control of the physical infrastructure powering its models.
The project would help OpenAI move toward owning AI infrastructure, but noted that its ability to fund enormous commitments remains under scrutiny because the company is still unprofitable despite a valuation of about $852 billion. OpenAI declined to comment, while Nvidia did not immediately respond to Reuters outside regular business hours.
Negotiations are nevertheless approaching a deal, but under terms that leave Nvidia responsible for substantially less than the original $250 billion guarantee.
The change does not reduce the ambition of OpenAI’s Ohio project. Instead, it exposes a growing constraint on the AI boom: even the companies benefiting most from unprecedented demand for computing power must decide how much financial risk they are willing to carry to keep the infrastructure expansion moving.
