July 26 (Reuters) - Nvidia is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing for OpenAI as part of a massive data center project in southern Ohio, 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 Pike County, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The power for the project is controlled by the U.S. government and funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal, with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick involved in deciding who will receive access to it, the report added.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Nvidia, OpenAI and U.S. Commerce Department did not respond to requests
for comment outside regular business hours.
In a March groundbreaking event, Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of the Japanese-based SoftBank Group, called the proposed $33 billion, 9.2-gigawatt power plant to fuel data centers "bigger than any power plant, I think, in the world … at least in the U.S. for sure. This is the biggest power generation in one location."
Then he went further, describing at least $500 billion of investment "in one campus" for data center operations, "in one shot," he said, to applause from the few hundred attending the invitation-only event on the grounds of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon.
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.
Lutnick previously expressed confidence in the project going forward to The Dispatch, noting the massive job creation expected to happen for the region as part of this project.
(Reporting by Abu Sultan in Bengaluru; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Lincoln Feast.)
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Nvidia in talks to guarantee $250 billion for mega Ohio data center, WSJ reports
