NVIDIA is reportedly ready to put an eye-watering sum on the line to keep the AI boom rolling. The chip giant is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees for OpenAI. The backstop would help the ChatGPT maker lease a massive data center, though all parties have stayed silent so far.
The project itself is staggering in scale. NVIDIA’s guarantee would support a 10-gigawatt data center that SoftBank’s energy subsidiary is developing in southern Ohio, planned for around 2028. The full project is expected to cost more than $500 billion once the chips inside are counted. For a sense of proportion, that is larger than the annual economic output of many countries.
For OpenAI, it marks a first step toward controlling its own infrastructure rather than renting compute from Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle. On the other hand, for NVIDIA, guaranteeing the project locks in demand for its chips for years, since the same report says NVIDIA is separately discussing financing up to $350 billion of OpenAI’s chip purchases.
The arrangement looks circular, since NVIDIA would effectively guarantee OpenAI’s spending on NVIDIA’s own products. Money flows out as a financing backstop, then returns as chip sales, which flatters demand figures without new outside capital entering the system.
Investor Michael Burry, famous for predicting the 2008 crash, reacted on X with the line “around and around we go,” and he has increased his short position against NVIDIA. His concern is that these interlocking deals inflate the appearance of AI demand, propping up valuations built on money the chipmaker is essentially lending to its own customers.
Around and around we go.
Nvidia to guarantee $200 billion of ChatGPT’s spending on $NVDA chips. pic.twitter.com/9iSIUd3bk2
— Cassandra Unchained (@michaeljburry) July 27, 2026
The backstop exists precisely because OpenAI needs the help. The company lacks an investment-grade credit rating, so favorable financing for a project this size would be hard to secure alone. A NVIDIA guarantee lowers the risk for lenders, which is generous, yet it also deepens OpenAI’s dependence on a single supplier.
Tech giants are increasingly tapping debt and equity markets to fund AI infrastructure, with global spending set to top $700 billion this year. Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all reportedly eyed the same Ohio site.
