Nvidia cuts OpenAI's Ohio backstop to under $120B

Three weeks ago we wrote that Nvidia was in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion of the financing behind OpenAI's Ohio campus, and the takeaway was to keep your AI contracts short. The number moved faster than the concrete. Per a Wall Street Journal report relayed by Reuters on August 14, the Nvidia OpenAI backstop is now expected to come in under $120 billion — and it only covers the first phase.

What actually happened

The site is unchanged: a 10-gigawatt campus in Pike County, southern Ohio, developed by SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy. The first phase is roughly 800 megawatts, arriving around 2028. What changed is how much of the debt behind it Nvidia is willing to put its name on. The $250 billion figure CNBC reported in late July covered the full build. The revised structure guarantees phase one and stops there.

Reuters attributes the change to investors raising concerns about Nvidia's exposure to large financing commitments. A separate discussion covering as much as $350 billion in chip purchases is reported to be running on its own track. Neither Nvidia nor OpenAI has publicly confirmed any of these figures, and the deal was described as close to signing rather than signed.

OpenAI still needs the guarantee for the same reason it needed one in July: it does not carry a credit rating that lets it borrow at those terms on its own name.

Why a shrinking backstop matters for your business

You are not going to lease a gigawatt. You are going to pay for tokens, and the price of those tokens is downstream of who is on the hook for the buildings.

Here is the part worth holding onto. Nothing about the physics changed between July 27 and August 14. No chip got cheaper, no data center got built. What changed was one financier's appetite, and it dropped by more than half in eighteen days. That is the actual signal: the capital structure under your AI vendor is a live variable, revised in weeks, by people who are not you.

So price accordingly. Any plan that assumes today's per-token rate holds through 2028 is assuming a financing arrangement that has already been rewritten once this month. We build for the version where it gets rewritten again — model layer behind an interface, prompts and evals in your repo, no rewrite required when the rate card moves.

Sources: Reuters, CNBC.