Symbolic imageOpenAI nears $500bn data-centre deal with $250bn Nvidia backstop
OpenAI is close to finalising a data-centre project worth roughly $500 billion, with Nvidia in talks to provide about $250 billion in financial guarantees, according to the New York Times. Neither company has confirmed the terms. The reports land as the cost of financing such projects rises and as Nvidia also stands behind a separate $50 billion data-centre lease in Texas.
What happened
The New York Times reports that OpenAI is close to landing a data centre worth about $500 billion and that Nvidia is in talks to provide a $250 billion financial backstop for it, which would rank among the largest arrangements of the AI boom. According to the same New York Times report, the guarantees would let OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt site being built at Piketon, Ohio, by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, with the US Department of Energy also part of the arrangement. Neither OpenAI nor Nvidia has confirmed the figures or the structure, so the terms remain unconfirmed. Separately, the Financial Times reports that Nvidia stands behind a $50 billion lease on a Texas data centre that will run on its own chips, a report Reuters relayed on the same day. The Wall Street Journal, examining the terms Meta accepted on its latest financing, writes that the price of funding the data-centre build-out is rising.
What could happen next
What is new is the scale and the direction of the money: Nvidia, the supplier of the chips, is increasingly underwriting the customers and the buildings that will house them, in Ohio through guarantees and in Texas through a lease. The rising financing costs described by the Wall Street Journal set that against a market that has begun to question the spending, with Apple moving back ahead of Nvidia as the world's most valuable public company, a shift the New York Times links to investor concern over AI costs. The next markers are whether OpenAI and Nvidia confirm the arrangement and disclose its terms, and how the guarantees are recorded in Nvidia's own accounts. The role of the Department of Energy in the Ohio site remains unspecified in the reporting so far.