OpenAI’s Data Center Partners Accumulate Massive Debt

OpenAI’s rapid rise as a global AI powerhouse is being fueled by an enormous surge in data center construction—and according to a new Financial Times analysis, the financial burden is increasingly falling on the company’s partners rather than on OpenAI itself. The report reveals that OpenAI’s data center collaborators are on track to accumulate nearly $100 billion in debt, even as the AI developer benefits from these investments without directly taking on equivalent financial risk.

The investigation highlights that SoftBank, Oracle, and CoreWeave have already borrowed at least $30 billion to fund investments or expand data center capacity supporting OpenAI’s operations. Additional infrastructure players, including Blue Owl Capital and Crusoe, are also heavily exposed, relying on revenue from OpenAI contracts to repay almost $28 billion in outstanding loans.

Sources familiar with the matter say a consortium of banks is currently in discussions to provide another $38 billion in financing to Oracle and data center developer Vantage, funding further facilities that would serve the fast-growing AI company. Negotiations are expected to conclude within the coming weeks, potentially pushing the total credit exposure tied to OpenAI-aligned projects toward the $100 billion mark.

Debt-Funded Expansion Strategy Raises Questions

Executives within OpenAI have acknowledged that the company plans to raise additional funds to help support these long-term infrastructure contracts. However, much of the current financial strain rests squarely on OpenAI’s partners and their lenders. As one senior OpenAI executive told the Financial Times, “The strategy has been this way. How does OpenAI leverage other people’s balance sheets?”

This financial structure has drawn increased scrutiny because of the massive scale of OpenAI’s multiyear commitments. Earlier this year, the company signed agreements worth $1.4 trillion to secure computing power from chip suppliers and data center companies over the next eight years. These obligations vastly exceed the startup’s expected $20 billion in annual revenue projected for this year, raising concerns about the long-term sustainability of the arrangements.

Industry observers note that the rapid acceleration in borrowing tied to AI infrastructure underscores the enormous capital requirements of next-generation model training. State-of-the-art systems require clusters of cutting-edge chips, complex cooling systems, and large-scale renewable power sources—investments that often run into tens of billions of dollars for each new facility.

Partners Shoulder the Risk While OpenAI Scales

The analysis shows a pattern emerging across the AI infrastructure ecosystem: OpenAI’s partners undertake aggressive borrowing to build capacity, while OpenAI secures long-term computing access without absorbing equivalent financial exposure. This model mirrors capital-intensive industries such as telecommunications or energy, but the speed and scale of borrowing tied to AI is unprecedented.

SoftBank, which has made large bets on AI-enabling technologies, has taken on significant loans to expand its data center footprint. CoreWeave, a rapidly growing cloud provider specializing in GPUs, is similarly dependent on heavy borrowing to scale its facilities. Oracle, meanwhile, has become one of OpenAI’s key cloud partners and is financing vast data center buildouts aligned with OpenAI’s compute needs.

The involvement of large investment firms such as Blue Owl Capital also indicates that private credit markets are increasingly intertwined with the AI boom. These firms rely on their OpenAI-related agreements for long-term returns; any disruption to OpenAI’s growth trajectory could pose a major challenge to their financing structures.

AI Industry Faces Mounting Questions About Sustainability

OpenAI’s model has fueled extraordinary technological advancement, but the FT’s findings raise concerns about whether the infrastructure underpinning that progress is financially sustainable over the long haul. Analysts argue that the concentration of debt among partners could expose the broader ecosystem to risk if growth projections falter or if computing demand shifts.

Still, supporters of the strategy contend that AI companies are racing to secure global leadership in a transformative technology, making aggressive upfront investment essential. They argue that the scale of computing required for frontier models justifies the use of long-term debt, particularly if future profits expand alongside AI adoption.

The next few years will determine whether the industry can maintain this pace of high-cost expansion without triggering structural stability issues. For now, OpenAI continues to scale rapidly—while its partners quietly take on the bulk of the financial risk required to power the next generation of AI innovation.