Nvidia in talks to guarantee $250 billion（約40兆円） financing for OpenAI data center

Nvidia is in advanced talks to provide roughly $250 billion（約40兆円） in financing guarantees to help OpenAI access a massive data center project, according to The Wall Street Journal reporting on Sunday. The facility is a 10-gigawatt data center being developed by SoftBank's energy subsidiary in southern Ohio.

OpenAI has been in advanced talks for several weeks to lease the site and shows among the strongest interest in the project, the report said. However, the company faces competition: Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all spoken to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in recent weeks about securing access to the facility.

The project's governance is complex and geopolitically significant. The power for the facility is controlled by the U.S. government and is funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal. Lutnick is directly involved in deciding which companies will receive access to the power and resources. Nvidia's potential role as a financing guarantor would be essential for OpenAI to move forward with leasing the site. Reuters was unable to independently verify the report; Nvidia, OpenAI, and the U.S. Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours.

This proposal represents a critical piece of infrastructure financing in the race to build AI data centers at the scale needed for next-generation AI systems. OpenAI's interest in leasing a 10-gigawatt facility underscores the enormous power demands of large language models and the companies' need for massive computational resources. The involvement of Nvidia as a potential financing guarantor is notable because Nvidia is a key supplier of the chips that power data centers—having the chipmaker back the financing may reflect both confidence in the project and Nvidia's direct stake in seeing major AI companies succeed and purchase its hardware.

The governance structure—with power controlled by the U.S. government and funding from Japan under a trade agreement—signals the geopolitical and strategic importance of AI infrastructure. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's role in allocating access reflects how central AI capacity has become to U.S. economic and competitive interests. The fact that multiple companies (Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI) are competing for the same facility indicates acute scarcity of large, ready-to-deploy data center capacity.

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