Nvidia has agreed to provide a guarantee of up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease a sprawling 8-gigawatt data center campus in Ohio, in one of the chipmaker’s largest-ever infrastructure financing commitments.
The deal, confirmed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, covers lease and power payments for the facility being developed by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, on the site of a decommissioned uranium-enrichment plant near Piketon, roughly 50 miles south of Columbus. OpenAI is leasing the site for 20 years, with the first 800 megawatts of capacity expected to come online in 2028.
From Chip Vendor to Financial Guarantor
In addition to the guarantee, Nvidia announced a $1.5 billion investment in SB Energy, months after OpenAI and SoftBank had each contributed $1 billion to expand the developer’s data center infrastructure. The company will be the exclusive chip provider for the facility, which is designed to house some of the most powerful AI training clusters ever assembled.
Huang pushed back against criticism that the arrangement amounts to circular financing, where Nvidia effectively guarantees OpenAI’s spending on Nvidia’s own products.
We are securing long-lived infrastructure for Nvidia compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories that can be upgraded repeatedly with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics.
Nvidia said its guarantee covers a portion of the lease and power payments, as well as a commitment to ensure the site retains a minimum value, rather than the full cost of the project.
$500 Billion Third-Party Financing Platform
The Ohio deal is part of a broader push by Nvidia to finance the AI infrastructure ecosystem around its chips. Last week, the company partnered with six major financial institutions, including BlackRock, Apollo, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, to launch financing platforms targeting more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.
The initiative marks a strategic shift for Nvidia from pure hardware vendor to a hybrid chipmaker-financier, using its balance sheet to unlock construction capital that data center developers and AI companies cannot access on their own. OpenAI, still privately held and unprofitable, lacks an investment-grade credit rating, making Nvidia’s backing essential for securing favorable lending terms.
Investor Michael Burry, known for his bets against the broader AI sector, publicly criticized the structure over the weekend. The full financing structure for the Ohio project is not yet defined and will include equity, potentially through a SB Energy IPO and SoftBank direct investment, followed by debt instruments including project finance loans and potentially public bonds.
Sources: Reuters; Wall Street Journal; TechCrunch; Bloomberg
discussion