OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease SB Energy's 10 GW data center campus in Piketon, Ohio, with Nvidia in discussions to guarantee roughly $250 billion of the financing behind it, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The site would be OpenAI's first as a tenant rather than a customer of Microsoft, Amazon, or Oracle, and Nvidia is separately discussing financing the accelerators going inside, which could run to another $350 billion. Terms haven't been settled, and the arrangement could still collapse.
OpenAI has no investment-grade credit rating, and Nvidia's involvement would let SB Energy raise debt against Nvidia's balance sheet instead of its tenant's. Nvidia has already put $30 billion into OpenAI, which has raised its projected compute spending to around $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year, according to the Journal. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick controls allocation of the site's power, and Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all spoken to him about it in recent weeks.
