Nvidia guarantees ~$250 billion of financing for OpenAI to lease SoftBank's 10-gigawatt Piketon, Ohio data center campus. Represents the largest single AI compute facility financing arrangement announced to date.
OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease SB Energy's 10-gigawatt data center campus in Piketon, Ohio, with Nvidia in discussions to guarantee roughly $250 billion of the financing behind it, according to reporting on Sunday. The site would represent OpenAI's first major owned or leased facility rather than leasing capacity from Microsoft, Amazon, or Oracle. Nvidia is separately discussing a $350 billion financing arrangement for the accelerators to be installed at the campus. Terms remain unsettled, and the arrangement could still collapse.
OpenAI lacks an investment-grade credit rating, making Nvidia's guarantee critical. The arrangement would allow SB Energy to raise debt against Nvidia's balance sheet instead of its tenant's. Nvidia has already invested $30 billion in OpenAI, which has raised its projected compute spending through 2030 to around $750 billion, up from approximately $600 billion earlier this year. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick controls power allocation for the site, and Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all recently approached him about it.
Nvidia's fiscal 2027 Q1 10-Q filing caps maximum gross exposure across all partner facility lease guarantees at $3.5 billion total, with $712 million in escrow. The company's initial disclosed guarantee, from Q3 fiscal 2026, was capped at $860 million with $470 million in escrow. Nvidia accepted these guarantees in exchange for warrants, accounting for them as credit derivatives with fair value marked as immaterial.
A $250 billion guarantee would represent roughly 71 times Nvidia's disclosed guarantee book, exceed a full year of the company's revenue, and equal approximately four times its cash position. Nvidia closed fiscal 2026 on January 25 with $62.6 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, against full-year revenue of $215.9 billion and net income of $117 billion.
The Piketon site sits on land formerly occupied by the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which enriched uranium for the U.S. weapons program from 1954 until 2001 and remains under decontamination. SB Energy broke ground on March 20 alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Lutnick, and SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son. The site is one of 16 federal properties the Department of Energy has opened to data center development.
The campus will require 9.2 gigawatts of new natural gas generation and $4.2 billion in transmission work with AEP Ohio, funded by $33.3 billion that Japan committed under its trade agreement with the United States. The first phase, approximately 800 megawatts, is expected to come online in 2028.
OpenAI abandoned efforts to build its own data centers last year in favor of leasing arrangements. SoftBank, meanwhile, carries more than $130 billion in debt while funding buildouts across Ohio, France, and other locations.