Nvidia Shares Slide Nearly 5% as WSJ Reports $250-bn OpenAI Financing Talks 

July 28: Nvidia Corporation shares slid sharply on Monday, closing at $196.51, down $10.33, or 4.99%, as investor attention turned to reports of a massive financing arrangement tied to OpenAI’s data center ambitions. The stock extended its retreat in early Tuesday trading, changing hands around $194.60 as of 6:06 a.m. ET — a further drop of $1.91, or 0.97% — even as the shares remain well within their 52-week range of $164.07 to $236.54. 

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia is in discussions to guarantee approximately $250 billion in financing for OpenAI as part of an enormous data center buildout, a move that would deepen the ties between the world’s most valuable chipmaker and the company behind ChatGPT. 

The Journal reported that the financing backstop would help OpenAI secure a roughly 10-gigawatt facility that SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, is developing in southern Ohio. The arrangement, if finalized, would mark a pivotal shift for OpenAI, allowing it to move toward owning and controlling its own computing infrastructure rather than leasing capacity from cloud partners such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle. For Nvidia, the deal would help lock in demand for its chips well into the future. 

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The newspaper’s sources indicated the full scope of the project — including the cost of the chips that would power the data center — could exceed $500 billion. Southern Ohio, where the facility is expected to rise on a mix of federal and private land, has already drawn attention as a likely site for one of the largest AI infrastructure projects of its kind, a detail first surfaced last month by The Information. 

Notably, the $250 billion guarantee under discussion would apply strictly to the data center’s lease and debt obligations, not to the Nvidia hardware installed inside it, the Journal reported. Separately, Nvidia and OpenAI are said to be negotiating additional financing arrangements — potentially worth up to $350 billion — specifically to fund OpenAI’s chip purchases. 

Reuters, which cited the Journal’s reporting, said it was unable to independently confirm the details. Nvidia, OpenAI, and the U.S. Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment on the matter. 

Per the report, OpenAI has spent several weeks in advanced negotiations to lease the Ohio site and appears to be the frontrunner among the companies vying for space at the facility. Other major players — including Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google — have also held discussions with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in recent weeks regarding the project, underscoring the scale of competition for next-generation AI computing capacity. 

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The talks come amid a broader wave of debt- and equity-fueled spending on AI infrastructure across the technology sector. Industry-wide capital expenditure on AI and cloud buildouts is on pace to surpass $700 billion this year, as companies race to secure the computing power needed to train and run increasingly advanced AI models. 

For Nvidia, whose stock has now fallen in back-to-back sessions, the reported financing talks add a new dimension to how the company is positioning itself — not merely as a chip supplier, but as a financial underwriter of the very infrastructure boom driving demand for its products. 

Sources

• Reuters and WSJ
• https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nvidia-talks-with-openai-guarantee-250-billion-financing-data-center-wsj-reports-2026-07-26/
• https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-in-talks-with-openai-to-guarantee-250-billion-financing-for-data-center-3dd6eae3