NVIDIA and OpenAI announced a $500 billion coordinated AI infrastructure buildout program. Scale and timeline details remain limited, but represents landmark commitment to sustained hyperscale capacity expansion.
NVIDIA is in advanced talks with OpenAI to provide a roughly US$250 billion guarantee as part of a massive data centre project in Ohio. According to reports, the project could exceed US$500 billion in total cost, including the semiconductor equipment for the facilities. The arrangement would enable OpenAI to lease a 10-gigawatt installation from Japanese investment holding company SoftBank in southern Ohio.
The US Department of Energy confirmed that SoftBank, through its subsidiary SB Energy, will build a minimum of 9.2 gigawatts of natural gas generation capacity to power 10 gigawatts of data centre infrastructure. Portions of this project were previously outlined as part of US President Donald Trump's US-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement, which includes US$33.3 billion in Japanese funding commitments.
NVIDIA's financial backing is strategically important: it enables SB Energy to secure debt financing on more favorable terms than would otherwise be available, given that OpenAI operates as an unprofitable private company. OpenAI has been negotiating the lease arrangement for several weeks.
The infrastructure expansion plans arrive amid mounting warnings from financial markets about excessive leverage in the AI sector. Credit default swaps—sensitive indicators of credit risk—tied to companies at the centre of the AI boom are rising sharply. Prices for credit default swaps on Oracle, SpaceX, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Broadcom, and NVIDIA have recently reached record highs, according to London Stock Exchange Group data. These instruments gained prominence after investor Michael Burry famously used them to profit from the 2008 housing crisis, as documented in *The Big Short*.
The concerns extend to government regulators. The Bank of England's July 2026 Financial Stability Report warned that a correction in AI-related equity prices could trigger a 2.2 percent decline in UK GDP. Sean Peche, Founder and Portfolio Manager at Ranmore Fund Management, cautioned investors against overvaluing uncertain long-term outcomes, noting that while previous bubbles were described as unprecedented at the time, "the truth is we just don't know" what the future holds. "AI is a very fast-moving world. Every day there is something new coming out," he observed, emphasizing that overpayment for unforecastable futures represents a key risk.
In a related development, NVIDIA has secured leases valued up to US$50 billion for a massive data centre facility in Texas. The company is leasing the entire 1-gigawatt facility under construction by Hut 8, a cryptocurrency mining firm that has pivoted to AI infrastructure.
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's Founder and CEO, characterized the buildout of AI infrastructure as "the largest infrastructure expansion in human history" during his company's May 2026 earnings announcement, noting that deployment is accelerating at extraordinary speed. McKinsey estimates project global data centre spending could reach US$7 trillion by 2030. Huang emphasized NVIDIA's positioning: "NVIDIA is uniquely positioned at the centre of this transformation as the only platform that runs in every cloud, powers every frontier and open-source model and scales everywhere AI is produced – from hyperscale data centres to the edge."