The leading semiconductor company Nvidia is reported in talks to pledge a mere $250 billion as “backup” for the tech bank called Softbank to get financing for one of the world’s largest planned “campuses” for data centers, supposed to be built in Ohio on Federal land, according to a report in Bloomberg, which is in turn citing the Wall Street Journal. The guarantee by Nvidia is just the latest example of the blatant “circular financing” by which the tech giants help fund each other’s data centers in order to sell millions of their memory devices or semiconductor chips or software products for the data centers.
The Ohio project is supposed to need a $500 billion investment. This data center “campus” is projected by OpenAI, with Softbank on the contract to provide the financing, which is not yet secured. Nvidia is considering guaranteeing half of that. Another candidate for “largest campus in the world,” the Prince William Digital Gateway in Virginia, recently appears to have failed, either due to withdrawal of investment by the same group of tech and fund management giants, or due to strong community opposition, or both.
