Nvidia has cut the financial guarantee it offered for a massive Ohio data centre from a discussed $250 billion to under $120 billion. Reuters reported the reduction, crediting the original scoop to the Wall Street Journal. The project is a 10 gigawatt campus being built for OpenAI by SB Energy, a SoftBank unit, so large that Reuters says no other announced data centre would rival it if finished. Nvidia’s retreat matters because the guarantee was never about chip sales. What it covered was the lease on the building and the debt behind it, not the hardware going inside.
Under the revised terms, Nvidia’s backstop now applies only to the project’s first phase, not the full 10 gigawatt build. Widely cited reporting puts that first phase at roughly five gigawatts, though Reuters itself does not confirm that figure directly. OpenAI has not decided how, or whether, to finance the remaining phases, and no timeline for that decision has surfaced.
Reuters attributes the reduction to investor concern over Nvidia’s financing exposure. The company has used its balance sheet to backstop the data centres that house its own chips, and shareholders are now pressing on how much of that risk belongs on Nvidia’s books rather than its customers’. The distinction between guaranteeing a building’s lease and guaranteeing chip demand is the whole story here, and most coverage of the cut has blurred it.
A chip vendor guaranteeing its own customer’s ability to pay for the buildings that house its chips is circular demand dressed up as financing. Investors flinching at the exposure is the market pricing that circularity, not a verdict on the underlying AI buildout itself. Cutting the guarantee by more than half, and narrowing what it covers, reads as Nvidia’s attempt to keep the relationship intact while moving downside off its own balance sheet.
AI Insiders has tracked the same dynamic elsewhere this week. Anthropic borrowed roughly $50 billion to fund compute ahead of revenue that could justify it, with suppliers absorbing part of that risk. Nvidia’s financing arm now looks less like a chip vendor’s balance sheet and more like a hyperscaler’s, extending credit to the customers who buy its chips.
Separately, Nvidia has lined up six financial institutions behind vehicles built to fund compute, targeting more than $500 billion of outside capital for AI infrastructure, an arrangement AI Insiders covered previously. That effort and the Ohio scale-back point the same direction: Nvidia wants financing exposure spread across a wider set of balance sheets, not concentrated on its own.
What remains open is who underwrites SB Energy’s later phases, and when that decision gets made. Operators tracking Nvidia-linked financing structures should treat the first-phase-only guarantee, not the $250 billion figure still circulating from earlier coverage, as the current baseline.
Reuters, reporting on a Wall Street Journal scoop, published this account on 15 August 2026.
