Nvidia in talks with OpenAI to guarantee $250 billion financing for data centre: report

Nvidia is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing for OpenAI as part of a massive data centre project, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

The guarantees from Nvidia would help the ChatGPT maker lease a 10-gigawatt project that SoftBank's energy subsidiary is developing in southern Ohio, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The project's power is controlled by the US government and funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal, with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick involved in deciding who will have access to it, the report added.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Nvidia, OpenAI and the US Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours.

OpenAI, which has been in advanced talks for several weeks to lease the site, is among the companies showing the strongest interest in the project, while Anthropic, Microsoft and Google have also spoken to Lutnick in recent weeks, the report said.

Nvidia-SK Group Partnership

Nvidia and South Korea's SK Group on Friday unveiled a more than $500 billion AI initiative spanning large-scale AI data centres and next-generation memory, Nvidia said.

The initiative includes a long-term partnership with SK Hynix to secure next-generation memory supply for Nvidia and jointly develop high-bandwidth memory for AI training, AI agents and physical AI applications.

As part of the initiative, SK Telecom plans to build a 2-gigawatt AI data centre powered by Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips and SK Hynix's HBM4 high-bandwidth memory, with the first facility due to come online in 2027, Nvidia added.

Separately, Nvidia said it, Naver and Brookfield plan to expand Naver's AI data centre in South Korea.

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