Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is discussing a financing backstop that could change who bears the risk of OpenAI’s next infrastructure expansion. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26 that Nvidia was in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion of financing for a proposed 10-gigawatt data center campus in southern Ohio, with OpenAI as a prospective tenant. Reuters said the project, being developed by SoftBank’s SB Energy, could cost more than $500 billion including hardware. Nvidia was also reportedly discussing separate financing of as much as $350 billion for chips at the site.
These are negotiations, not completed commitments. Nvidia’s connection runs through two specific financing channels. A guarantee could let lenders underwrite the OpenAI lease against Nvidia’s stronger credit, while separate chip financing could fund purchases of Nvidia’s own accelerators. Both could accelerate product deployment, but the guarantee would also expose Nvidia to customer-credit and project-execution risk. That proposed combination explains why investors worried that some future chip demand may depend on the supplier helping customers finance it.
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Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is linked through OpenAI’s cloud spending, not through general AI-sector exposure. If OpenAI directly leases and controls the Ohio campus instead of buying the equivalent compute through Azure, Microsoft could avoid some capital burden but miss the related cloud-infrastructure revenue and control over workload placement. It does not, however, establish that OpenAI is leaving Microsoft.
The companies’ April 27 amended agreement says Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner and OpenAI products will ship first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the required capabilities. OpenAI can serve products across other cloud providers, while Microsoft retains a non-exclusive license to OpenAI models and products through 2032 and remains a major shareholder. An October 2025 agreement also included an incremental $250 billion commitment by OpenAI to buy Azure services. The Ohio proposal therefore represents infrastructure diversification at the margin, not a clean break.
Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database shows 282 hedge-fund portfolios with reportable MSFT long positions at March 31, 2026, down from 312 at December 31, 2025. It indicates that Microsoft remained very widely owned even after some funds exited during the quarter.
The July 15 settlement data showed 92,373,474 MSFT shares sold short, equal to 1.24% of public float. Microsoft’s latest 10-Q disclosed conventional senior notes, not convertible debt, and no pending stock-for-stock transaction. That makes the low short float a relatively clean indication that bearish positioning was not crowded before the latest financing story.
While we acknowledge the risk and potential of NVDA and MSFT as investments, our conviction lies in the belief that some other AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than NVDA and MSFT and that has 10,000% upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
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