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Nvidia in talks to back OpenAI's 10-gigawatt Ohio data center at a combined cost exceeding $500 billion

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Nvidia is negotiating to provide roughly $250 billion to finance OpenAI's lease of a planned 10-gigawatt campus near Piketon, Ohio, with a separate $350 billion chip purchase under discussion, per Bloomberg and CNBC reports from July 2026.

Nvidia in talks to back OpenAI's 10-gigawatt Ohio data center at a combined cost exceeding $500 billion

Nvidia is in early-stage talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing to back OpenAI's lease of a 10-gigawatt data center campus near Piketon, Ohio. A separate agreement for OpenAI to purchase up to $350 billion in Nvidia chips is also under discussion, per Bloomberg and CNBC reports published July 26-27, 2026. Combined, the two deals would push total costs past $500 billion, per Forbes. That structure puts the chip-seller in the role of primary financier for a project whose defining output is buying more chips from that same seller.

What

Planned for a decommissioned uranium enrichment facility in Piketon, roughly 50 miles south of Columbus, the campus is being developed by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank. Phase one covers an 800-megawatt build-out expected to reach operational status by 2028. At full scale, 10 gigawatts of capacity would surpass OpenAI's previously announced 3.2-gigawatt Georgia project and, per Forbes, dwarf the power output of every other planned data center project.

Structurally, the deal splits into two discrete agreements. Nvidia's proposed $250 billion contribution would cover OpenAI's lease obligation to SB Energy, not the hardware inside the facility. A separate $350 billion chip commitment, if executed, would be its own commercial transaction on top of that. Bloomberg noted that negotiations remain in early stages and could be restructured or fall apart before closing.

Why it matters

Embedded in the scale of this deal is a structural question about how AI infrastructure spending is actually counted. Aleksandar Tomic of Boston College, quoted by Al Jazeera, put it directly: companies like Nvidia invest billions into AI developers who then become the largest purchasers of Nvidia's own products, producing the appearance of demand through internal money flows rather than genuine end-customer revenue. Bloomberg separately reported that Nvidia's aggregate AI deals under negotiation during the same week exceeded $750 billion in total, a figure the outlet described as reigniting concerns about circular financing across the industry.

For AI-tool operators building on GPU-dependent infrastructure, the near-term impact is limited. But a collapse in negotiations or federal scrutiny of the financing structure would affect high-end GPU supply and pricing in ways that extend well beyond OpenAI and Nvidia.

Context and reactions

Piketon is on federally owned land, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is overseeing power allocation decisions for the campus, per Forbes. Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have also expressed interest in the site, which introduces competition for the energy allocation that underpins the project. A $33 billion US government arrangement with Japan is expected to fund the natural gas plant that would supply power. At full build-out, 10 gigawatts of capacity could power roughly 8.4 million US households, per Forbes estimates.

What to watch next

On the commercial side, the $350 billion chip purchase agreement is the more concrete milestone: it directly determines Nvidia's forward revenue visibility in ways the lease backstop does not. Federal energy permitting for a 10-gigawatt facility on a former nuclear site is a separate variable that could reshape the timeline regardless of financing. That 2028 first-phase target gives both parties roughly 18 months before the initial operational benchmark, and Bloomberg noted that any element of the deal structure could still change.

Sources