Nvidia and OpenAI in talks for up to $250 billion dollar backstop to fund AI infrastructure plans

OpenAI is in discussions with Nvidia about a backstop of up to $250 billion that would help fund its ambitious plans to lease a massive new artificial intelligence data center, CNBC confirmed.

The backstop would let OpenAI raise debt for a 10-gigawatt data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, on the strength of Nvidia’s credit, according to a person familiar with the discussions who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The guarantee would cover the lease and construction debt, not the Nvidia chips inside, which the two companies are discussing separately, the person said.

Nvidia declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the negotiations about the $250 billion backstop.

The large site in Ohio once functioned as a uranium-enrichment plant, the person said. A gigawatt is a measure of power, and 10 gigawatts is roughly equivalent to the annual power consumption of 8 million U.S. households, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the Energy Information Administration. The data center campus could cost more than $500 billion in total, the person said.

The talks about the site and its financing are in progress and still subject to change, according to another person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.

OpenAI kick-started the AI boom with the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, and has been racing to secure the computing power it deems necessary to meet future demand for its models and services as it faces heightened competition from the likes of Anthropic, Google, Amazon and Meta. Those companies are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on capex to support their own AI infrastructure ambitions.

In September, Nvidia said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a strategic partnership where the company would deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems. That investment never materialized, though Nvidia contributed $30 billion to the record-breaking funding round that OpenAI closed in March.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it “might be the last time” the company invests in OpenAI before it goes public. OpenAI confidentially filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but has not disclosed an official timeline for its debut.

OpenAI is now valued at nearly $1 trillion by private investors betting that the company will maintain its lead in AI and find a long-term workable business model, which faces increased uncertainty as a host of open-weight alternatives, largely out of China, threaten to undercut its pricing power.

SoftBank and SB Energy are developing the Ohio data center campus in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. SoftBank is a major investor in OpenAI, and the two companies announced plans to invest $1 billion in SB Energy earlier this year.

— CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos and Lora Kolodny contributed to this story

WATCH: OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor on AI tokenomics, token efficiency