Nvidia has scaled back the financial guarantee it is prepared to extend to a proposed OpenAI data center in Ohio, and is now expected to initially backstop less than $120 billion — down sharply from the $250 billion previously under discussion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The revision narrows the commitment rather than withdrawing it. Nvidia is expected to guarantee only the first phase of the project instead of the whole build, according to the report, which said an agreement between the two companies was close and could be signed within days.
Investor pressure reshaped the structure
The change followed concerns raised by investors about how much risk Nvidia was absorbing through large financing commitments, the Journal said. That concern is structural rather than incidental: guaranteeing a customer's data center debt means Nvidia would be underwriting demand for its own chips, a circularity that makes the revenue harder to read.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside business hours, and OpenAI declined to comment.
Third-party capital instead of a balance-sheet promise
The retreat lines up with a move Nvidia made days earlier. The company partnered with six major financial institutions to launch compute financing platforms targeting more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.
Read together, the two developments point to a deliberate shift: route the capital requirement to banks and institutional investors rather than carry it as a guarantee on Nvidia's own books. The financing still has to come from somewhere, but the risk lands on parties whose business is pricing it.
The Ohio project remains the largest on the board
OpenAI is still negotiating a binding lease for the full 10-gigawatt Ohio development, which is being built by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary. If completed, it would be the largest data center project announced to date.
A phased guarantee changes how such a site gets financed. Later phases would need their own backers, which effectively converts one enormous commitment into a series of decisions that can be repriced as demand data arrives — more flexible for Nvidia, less certain for OpenAI's build schedule.
Why OpenAI needed the backstop
Owning infrastructure rather than renting it would give OpenAI more control over cost and capacity, which is the strategic case for the project. The obstacle is its ability to fund commitments at this scale: the company remains unprofitable despite a valuation of $852 billion, and lenders price a lease against cash generation rather than a private mark.
That is exactly the gap an Nvidia guarantee was meant to bridge. A smaller backstop means OpenAI must show more of the case on its own numbers, or find other guarantors for the phases Nvidia is no longer covering.
Outlook
Nothing in the report suggests the Ohio project is in doubt, and a first-phase guarantee under $120 billion is still an extraordinary commitment by any historical measure. What has changed is the willingness of the AI supply chain's most profitable company to keep absorbing its customers' financing risk.
For the rest of the buildout, that is the signal worth tracking. If the terms of AI infrastructure financing are being set by institutional lenders rather than by chip vendors, projects will increasingly have to clear a return threshold rather than a strategic one.
