OpenAI's ambitious plan to build the world's largest artificial intelligence data center in Ohio could soon get a massive $250 billion boost from semiconductor giant Nvidia. The proposed deal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, would help the ChatGPT creator secure a lease for a colossal 10-gigawatt facility in Piketon, Ohio, built by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank.
The entire project could eventually cost more than $500 billion when including the high-powered AI chips needed inside. The data center facility is slated to begin delivering up to 800 megawatts of electricity by 2028—enough energy to power approximately 640,000 homes. Energy for the site will come through a separate $33 billion U.S. government agreement with Japan involving a natural gas plant, built on land leased from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Nvidia’s proposed $250 billion guarantee would cover the financial lease for the data center itself. However, the chips required inside the center represent an additional $350 billion in value, and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is reportedly in discussions regarding that hardware as well. For OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, building its own dedicated infrastructure marks a major shift from its current practice of renting server space from cloud giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle.
Despite the grand scale, the news has sparked sharp concern among financial analysts over what critics call "circular financing." OpenAI remains unprofitable, yet it is making multi-billion-dollar commitments supported by hardware suppliers. Aleksandar Tomic, an associate dean at Boston College, pointed out that Nvidia is providing funds to a customer so that the customer can continue buying Nvidia's own chips. Critics argue this practice mirrors patterns seen during the 1999 dot-com bubble, where tech companies artificially inflated market demand by buying products from one another using shared capital.
Investors appeared cautious following the report, sending Nvidia's stock down 4.9 percent in midday trading. Meanwhile, data centers are facing growing political pushback across the United States over heavy energy use, with New York recently enacting a one-year moratorium on new data center construction. Nevertheless, proponents of the deal argue that such investments represent natural economic cooperation in a rapidly expanding AI industry.