Nvidia’s in discussions to provide a guarantee of about US$250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing from a giant data centre project planned for southern Ohio, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The deal should help the AI lab lease a 10-gigawatt data centre hub that SoftBank Group is developing in Ohio, the Journal said. That project may cost about US$500 billion, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son has said. Nvidia’s guarantee would help SoftBank borrow more capital to bankroll its construction.
ChatGPT’s developer has been in talks to lease that capacity for several weeks, it said. The data centre complex as envisioned would be among the largest in the world – a mega-symbol of the enormous demand for computing to propel AI development.
It’s also a centrepiece project for both SoftBank and the Trump administration, which has hailed the investment as a major win.
SoftBank joins big tech firms like Alphabet in driving trillions of dollars into data centre construction and AI development in coming years. The deal underscores the circular nature of the increasingly large transactions that power the AI industry, where giant tech firms finance the projects that ultimately funnel business back to them.
Investors have in recent weeks begun to cool on lofty tech stock valuations, worried that there’s more capacity under construction than future AI services will require.
Huang directed billions of dollars into companies throughout the AI supply chain. He’s aiming to accelerate the uptake of his products and eliminate roadblocks that threaten to slow the adoption of artificial intelligence.
Nvidia is separately investing US$1 billion in Naver Corp to help finance an AI data center under construction, and is teaming up with SK Group to build more than 2 gigawatts of AI data centres on the Korean Peninsula.
For Nvidia, closer ties with SK will help improve its access to high-bandwidth memory chips. That conglomerate’s SK Hynix business and South Korean rival Samsung Electronics are the two biggest providers of the crucial components – chips that are in short supply because of the global build-out of AI data centres.
Huang has argued that investments in companies such as Anthropic PBC and OpenAI will help not only his business but provide an investment return. Critics have expressed concern that such moves represent an artificial inflation of demand.
