Nvidia cuts OpenAI Ohio data-center guarantee to under $120B

The number Nvidia was originally reportedly willing to put behind OpenAI's Ohio buildout was $250 billion, which is not a rounding error even for a company its size. According to the Wall Street Journal, the chipmaker is now negotiating a guarantee of less than $120 billion, covering only the first phase of the 10-gigawatt campus in Pike County, Ohio, rather than the full multi-hundred-billion-dollar buildout. The revised structure was first reported on Friday and picked up on the wires the same day.

The catalyst for the retreat looks pretty clearly like the tape. Nvidia shares fell 5% when the Journal first reported the discussions around the $250 billion backstop, and the pullback is intended to address investor concerns about the chipmaker's risk exposure as it uses its balance sheet to help drive demand for its own AI chips. Halving the guarantee is not a repudiation of that strategy, just a narrowing of it, and it fits a broader run of AI infrastructure financing stories where capital structure has become as newsworthy as the compute itself.

The rest of the deal is still very big. The campus sits on U.S. Department of Energy land in Pike County and is designed to eventually support roughly 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity, with the site developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary. A separate GPU financing arrangement is being negotiated on the side that people familiar with the talks say could total as much as $350 billion. Nvidia also announced a Monday partnership with six financial institutions to establish compute financing platforms targeting over $500 billion in third-party capital, which suggests the company would rather channel demand through other people's balance sheets going forward. OpenAI has moved in a parallel direction, hiring a power trader to hedge its data-center bills.

A few things the retrieved reports do not settle. Neither Nvidia nor OpenAI has publicly confirmed the revised numbers, so the $120 billion figure is a single-outlet leak corroborated by wire coverage rather than by either party. The reports do not say who guarantees the phases beyond the first, whether covenant terms on the initial phase tighten to compensate, or how the standalone $350 billion chip deal is milestoned against the buildout. The first phase is described as delivering about 800 megawatts by 2028, which pushes the interesting execution risk out several years.

If you buy or sell Nvidia stock, the read is that management heard the market and blinked. If you run an AI infrastructure business, the read is that even the most capitalized customer in AI cannot pull down $250 billion of vendor credit in a single signature anymore.