OpenAI partners take on $100B debt to fund AI compute infrastructure – FT

OpenAI’s U.S. data center build is being financed largely through nearly $100 billion of partner debt. SoftBank, Oracle and CoreWeave have raised about $30 billion to date, and a bank group is in advanced talks on a $38 billion loan for Oracle and Vantage Data Centers to develop new U.S. sites, Financial Times reports.

Investment vehicles tied to Blue Owl Capital and computing firm Crusoe support roughly $28 billion more in loans linked to OpenAI contracts, according to people familiar with the financing. The prospective $38 billion facility would back campuses in Texas and Wisconsin and could be signed in the coming weeks, the people noted.

OpenAI executives have told partners they plan to use debt to help fund long-term compute agreements, but most borrowing so far sits with counterparties and lenders. The San Francisco company has limited borrowings on its own balance sheet and secured a $173 billion credit line last year that remains undrawn, per people close to the company.

The borrowing reflects multiyear commitments to reserve computing power for training and running models. OpenAI has entered roughly $1.4 trillion in agreements with chipmakers and data center operators over the next eight years, far above expected annualized revenue of $20 billion this year.

Oracle has issued $18 billion in bonds to fund infrastructure for OpenAI-related workloads, according to investors. Analysts expect the company led by Larry Ellison may need to borrow as much as $100 billion over four years to meet its obligations, including the potential $38 billion financing for Vantage-built campuses in Texas and Wisconsin that Oracle will lease.

SoftBank has raised about $20 billion this year for AI investments, with OpenAI its largest commitment, according to a person close to the company. Of SoftBank’s $8.5 billion bridge loan used for its capital injection into OpenAI, about $1 billion has been repaid. The person added that several billions raised this year were used to redeem existing bonds rather than fund new projects.

CoreWeave, which supplies compute to Microsoft under major contracts, has borrowed more than $10 billion to lease and equip data center capacity, according to people familiar with its financing. Some of that capacity may be routed to OpenAI through Microsoft’s arrangements with the startup.

The scale of debt tied to OpenAI is comparable to the net debt directly carried by some of the world’s largest corporate borrowers, based on a 2024 report from asset manager Janus Henderson. The total could increase as developers work through multi-year schedules for power, land and hardware.

OpenAI, valued at about $500 billion, says it needs more infrastructure to support long-term research goals, including training systems it characterizes as progressing toward artificial general intelligence. The company points to limited supplies of advanced chips and power-intensive data center space as constraints on product rollouts.