Nvidia Backs $105B in Financing for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center — Its Largest Compute Commitment Yet

OpenAI signed a 10-year lease for a data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, that will eventually draw 8 gigawatts of computing capacity — and Nvidia is guaranteeing up to $105 billion in the lease and power obligations behind it, according to CNBC and The Information.

SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, will build and manage the site under a 20-year lease with OpenAI. Nvidia’s credit guarantee covers an initial 4.25 gigawatts, with an option to expand to 3.75 more, and capacity is expected to come online in phases starting in 2028. Beyond the guarantee, Nvidia is putting real equity in: it’s investing $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy now, with talks underway to push that stake as high as $3 billion.

The math on power alone is staggering: the campus will require at least 10 gigawatts of new generation to run — roughly the output of ten large nuclear reactors, dedicated to one company’s compute buildout. That’s the scale OpenAI now operates at building toward its Stargate ambitions, and it’s Nvidia underwriting the financial risk rather than a bank or a bond market, which tells you how central OpenAI’s continued GPU purchasing is to Nvidia’s own forward revenue.

This is a circular-financing pattern Nvidia has now run multiple times: back the customer’s ability to buy your chips, so the demand curve that justifies your valuation keeps materializing. Nvidia effectively guarantees OpenAI’s ability to pay for capacity that will overwhelmingly be filled with Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia-adjacent infrastructure — a loop investors have flagged as a risk if AI compute demand ever cools, since Nvidia’s balance sheet is now directly exposed to whether OpenAI’s usage keeps climbing.

For OpenAI, locking in 8GW in Ohio — on top of Stargate sites already under construction elsewhere — is the clearest signal yet that training and serving next-generation models is now a power-plant-scale problem before it’s a chip problem. Land, permitting, and grid capacity are the actual bottleneck; the $105 billion figure is Nvidia buying its way past all three by making the financing risk disappear for whoever’s willing to build.

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