Jim Cramer says Washington will not let Nvidia lose the artificial intelligence race to China. He frames the US government as a quiet backstop standing behind the chipmaker’s biggest bets.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick controls power access to a federal site in Ohio. Nvidia is negotiating a 0 billion guarantee there for OpenAI, tying the chipmaker directly to a government decision.

Nvidia’s Backstop Meets Washington’s Power Switch

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly 0 billion in financing for OpenAI’s lease, the Wall Street Journal reported. The deal covers a 10-gigawatt data center campus in Piketon, Ohio.

The site sits on decommissioned federal land. The full project, including the chips that would fill those halls, could exceed 0 billion.

Electricity for the campus flows from a natural gas plant that Japan is funding with a billion investment. That investment is part of a recent US trade deal.

Lutnick decides which company gets access to that power. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all approached him about the site. In practice, that gives Washington a lever over who can build the largest AI clusters in the country, because a data center is only as valuable as the electricity it can draw.

Washington in Deep with Nvidia, Says Cramer

On Monday night’s episode of “Mad Money,” Cramer linked Nvidia’s financial strength to Washington’s stake in the outcome.

“They have the best balance sheet of any company in the world,” Cramer said. He added that the government is a “subtle backstop” so China does not win the AI race.

Nvidia’s cash and a government hand on the power switch make a powerful combination. A backstop, in market terms, is an implicit promise that a larger party will absorb losses if a deal goes wrong, and it can lower the risk investors attach to a bet. That combination helps explain why Cramer still calls Nvidia a stock to own even as shares slide.

Not everyone agrees the setup is healthy. Investor Michael Burry has called the arrangement circular.

He argues Nvidia’s guarantees would fund OpenAI’s purchases of Nvidia’s own chips, so the same money loops back to the vendor as revenue. Nvidia is discussing that separate chip financing package, which could reach 0 billion. OpenAI also lacks its own investment-grade credit rating, a gap that already caused other financing troubles this year and forces partners to shoulder more of the risk.

The bigger question is what happens if Washington’s role in AI infrastructure becomes the industry’s financing template. If government-controlled power and implicit guarantees become the way megaprojects get built, the line between private capital and public policy in the AI boom grows harder to see. That role already includes Jensen Huang’s open-model push and Nvidia’s new security alliance.

Source: BeInCrypto