Nvidia was reported to be in talks on a roughly $250 billion backstop for OpenAI’s data-center project. The proposal would give a SoftBank unit a larger financing cushion for a 10-gigawatt build in southern Ohio.
Oracle Corp. stock rose 1.4% in overnight trading late Sunday after the report. That move shows how quickly financing news around OpenAI can spill into the price of a company already under pressure over data-center debt.
SoftBank Unit in southern Ohio
The guarantees would help the SoftBank unit lease the site on better debt terms than it could secure if OpenAI lacked a financial backer. A backstop works as a credit support layer, so lenders can price the risk against the guarantor rather than rely only on the tenant’s balance sheet.
The scale is unusual even by AI infrastructure standards. A 10-gigawatt site points to power demand far beyond a normal enterprise data-center build, which is why access to the site has become a financing and policy issue rather than a simple real-estate deal.
Howard Lutnick and site access
Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Commerce Secretary, has been involved in deciding who will receive access to the project’s power. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google have spoken with him about the site in recent weeks, which shows that the power decision is shaping who can use the buildout rather than just who can rent space.
The practical question now is whether Nvidia will actually commit the reported backstop and on what terms. If the guarantee is structured as expected, the SoftBank unit could borrow more cheaply, while Oracle Corp. stays exposed to investor scrutiny over the debt it has taken on to expand data-center capacity for OpenAI-related cloud contracts.
That pressure has already shown up in the market, and readers tracking the trade should watch the financing side as closely as the hardware side; related coverage has also pointed to the Nvidia share price falls 15% and the broader SK Hynix ADR listing pressure around AI supply chains.
