Nvidia halves its OpenAI data-center backstop to under $120B on investor risk fears

Nvidia is sharply cutting the financial guarantee it’s willing to extend for OpenAI’s planned data center in Ohio, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The backstop, originally floated at roughly $250 billion, is being reduced to less than $120 billion — about half its initial size. Rather than underwriting the entire buildout, Nvidia would now guarantee only the first phase of the project, while OpenAI continues negotiating a binding lease for the full 10-gigawatt campus.

The retreat is driven by investor unease over how much balance-sheet risk Nvidia is taking on by financially propping up its own largest customer. Guaranteeing hundreds of billions in data-center commitments blurs the line between chip supplier and lender, creating circular-financing exposure that shareholders have flagged as a concern. Scaling the guarantee back to a single phase limits Nvidia’s downside if demand or financing for later phases falls through.

The two companies were reported to be close to an agreement, with a deal possible within days. The episode is a notable data point on the AI infrastructure boom: even the buildout’s biggest beneficiary is growing more cautious about the size of the vendor-financing commitments now underpinning frontier-scale compute, and about tying its own credit to a single customer’s expansion.