Nvidia halves OpenAI's $250B data center backstop to $120B
The biggest guarantee in AI financing just got a lot smaller — and the reason is risk, not strategy.
Nvidia has cut its planned financial backing for OpenAI's Ohio data center nearly in half, from a $250 billion guarantee to just under $120 billion, after investors pushed back on the company's exposure, the Wall Street Journal reports. The scaled-down backstop covers only the first construction phase — roughly five gigawatts of capacity — while OpenAI separately negotiates a lease for the full 10-gigawatt campus being developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary. Nvidia is also in talks about separate financing for OpenAI's chip purchases worth up to $350 billion, according to the report. The company has not commented publicly.
The pullback matters because it is the clearest signal yet that even the AI boom's biggest beneficiary is being told to manage its bets. This is the same Nvidia that two days ago was backing a $500 billion data center deal with a GPU value guarantee — we covered that move on Thursday — Nvidia backs $500B data center deal with GPU value guarantee. Now its own shareholders are capping the OpenAI relationship at roughly half the headline number, and the timing is awkward: it lands the same week Anthropic's first profitable quarter complicated the bubble narrative from the other direction — Anthropic's first profitable quarter rewrites the IPO math.
What to make of it: guarantees like this were never charity — they were how Nvidia locked OpenAI into its hardware while earning a slice of the upside. Halving the guarantee doesn't end the deal; the $350 billion chip-financing talks suggest the commercial relationship is intact. But it does change the optics. When the company most exposed to AI demand says it will only risk $120 billion on OpenAI's biggest campus, the "unlimited appetite" story takes a hit — and the debt markets, which the July reports said balked at the original structure, get a quieter vote of confidence.
What to watch: whether the $350 billion chip financing materializes, and what the final lease terms for the full 10-gigawatt SB Energy project look like.
If Nvidia's own investors are capping the AI build-out, who carries the risk on the next $100 billion? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal · Reuters · The Decoder
