Anissa Gardizy reported the cut for The Wall Street Journal on 14 August. Under the new proposed terms Nvidia would initially backstop only half of the 10GW project, and it would decide about the rest later. A deal could be signed as soon as this weekend.

The Journal says Nvidia made the change to address investor concerns about its own risk exposure.

Reuters carried the story the same evening. OpenAI is still negotiating a binding lease for the full 10GW. SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, is developing the site, and it would be the largest data centre project announced anywhere.

The scale of the campus explains the size of the promise. A first phase of roughly 800MW is due for completion in 2028, and the total project cost passes $500bn once the silicon is counted. OpenAI has no investment-grade credit rating, so lenders were being asked to price the debt against Nvidia’s instead.

The number moved because the share price did

This desk reported the $250bn backstop on 27 July, the day after the Journal broke it. It would have been the largest financial guarantee ever discussed between two private companies. Nvidia shares fell 5% after that first Journal report, and the guarantee is now under half the size.

Read those two facts in order and the sequence is plain. The market priced the promise, disliked the price, and the promise shrank. Nothing about the Ohio campus itself changed in three weeks.

What the arrangement still contains

The backstop is not the whole deal. A separate agreement to finance OpenAI’s chip purchases could total $350bn across the full project, and that is money Nvidia would help arrange rather than guarantee outright. Goldman Sachs is advising SB Energy, and Morgan Stanley is advising Nvidia.

The power is the part nobody is arguing about. The US government controls it, and Japan funds it separately under a recent trade deal.

There is history here too. Nvidia and OpenAI announced an agreement last September covering at least 10GW, with Nvidia investing up to $100bn. That deal stalled after some inside Nvidia expressed doubts. This is the second time the same partnership has been trimmed.

The filing that landed the same week

Nvidia disclosed its US equity holdings for the quarter ended 30 June in a 13F filing on 14 August. CNBC and Bloomberg both read it. The headline number is SpaceX, at 122.8 million Class A shares worth roughly $21bn, which makes it Nvidia’s second-largest position.

Intel is the bigger one. Nvidia held 214.8 million Intel shares worth about $30bn at the end of June, built from an investment of $5bn. A quarter earlier the same stake was worth roughly $9.5bn.

That gain is Intel’s doing rather than Nvidia’s. Intel has roughly quintupled over 12 months on the strength of its foundry turnaround, and the $5bn went in less than a year ago. Nvidia bought into a recovery that then happened, which is a different thing from engineering one.

The rest of the book is short. Nvidia also holds Coherent, Generate Biomedicines, Nebius, Nokia and Synopsys. It is the sixth-biggest investor in SpaceX, where Musk holds about $850bn and Alphabet about $78bn.

Where the SpaceX shares came from is disputed

Here the two outlets part company, and the difference matters. CNBC says the shares came from Nvidia’s $10bn investment in xAI in January, as part of a $20bn round. Bloomberg says Nvidia put as much as $2bn into xAI during 2025, through a financing that mixed equity and debt inside a special purpose vehicle built to buy its processors.

Those are different sums from different years, and we are not picking one. SpaceX then acquired xAI in February at $1.25trn, which is how an xAI position became a SpaceX position.

Both stakes have already moved

A 13F is a photograph of 30 June, and it ages quickly. SpaceX closed at $140 on Friday, down from $170.86 at the end of June, so that stake is now worth about $17.2bn. Intel has fallen too, leaving its roughly $22bn.

Call it $12bn of value gone in six weeks, on paper, across two positions. The desk covered the post-IPO unwind in June, when the stock gave back 18% from its peak.

Nvidia is not the only company marking a SpaceX holding this year. Alphabet disclosed $94.1bn of SpaceX shares in July, most of it locked up.

The circle keeps closing

Both of the big holdings buy Nvidia chips. Musk has said SpaceX will use Nvidia silicon exclusively, and he expects a significant allocation of Vera Rubin GPUs next year. Intel makes chips, and its own recovery runs partly through work Nvidia sends it.

This is the pattern the desk has tracked all year. Nvidia spent more than $40bn on equity in the first four months of 2026, and almost all of it went to companies that buy its hardware.

The financing side has grown the same way. Six of the largest firms in finance signed up this week to build compute financing platforms around Nvidia hardware, targeting more than $500bn of outside capital. Those are memorandums rather than committed money, which is the caveat that keeps getting lost.

What a filing shows, and what it does not

The 13F is a legal requirement, it arrives quarterly, and it is marked to market. Anyone can read it. The Nvidia OpenAI backstop is none of those things, because a guarantee sits off the balance sheet until somebody calls it.

That asymmetry is the actual story. Investors could see the equity book, so they priced it. They could not see the guarantee, so they priced the fear instead, and the number came down.

OpenAI is the other half of this. It carries an $852bn valuation and is not profitable, Reuters noted, which is precisely why it needed somebody else’s credit rating in the first place. Nvidia did not respond to Reuters, and OpenAI declined to comment.

What would settle it

Three things, and the first is the signature. Either the first-phase deal is signed this weekend at under $120bn, or the number moves again before anyone writes it down.

The second is phase two. Nvidia has reserved the right to decide later, and whoever ends up guaranteeing the remaining 5GW tells you who is carrying the risk.

The third is the next 13F. It will show whether Nvidia held those SpaceX shares through the fall, or quietly sold into it.

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