Nvidia's $750 Billion Deals Revive Fear of AI Circular Financing

What happened

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee $250 billion to help OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt data center from SoftBank's SB Energy in Piketon, Ohio, on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. Simultaneously, Nvidia sealed a $500 billion+ AI infrastructure initiative with South Korea's SK Group including a 2-gigawatt data center and co-development of HBM4 memory.

Context and impact

The combined $750 billion total reignites fears of circular financing: Nvidia invests in customers like OpenAI and SK Hynix, who then buy hundreds of billions in Nvidia GPUs, artificially inflating demand and valuations. For OpenAI, the deal would mark a historic shift toward owning its own infrastructure instead of renting from Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle.

Details

• Nvidia would guarantee $250B in lease and construction debt for the Ohio data center
• Separate discussions on financing OpenAI's chip purchases up to $350 billion
• SK Telecom will build a 2GW AI data center powered by Nvidia Vera Rubin platform
• SK Hynix + Nvidia co-developing HBM4 high-bandwidth memory — AI's key bottleneck
• Critics warn: if real AI demand disappoints, losses are amplified throughout the sector