July 26 (Reuters) - Nvidia is in talks to provide a roughly $250 billion financing for OpenAI as part of a massive data center 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 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.
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.
(Reporting by Abu Sultan in Bengaluru; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Lincoln Feast.)
