Nvidia will guarantee up to $105 billion in financing for an OpenAI data center in Pike City, Ohio, according to a securities filing published Monday. The credit backs an initial 4.25 gigawatts of compute capacity, with an option for another 3.75 gigawatts, and lets OpenAI raise debt against Nvidia's balance sheet to fund the buildout. Capacity is expected to come online in phases starting in 2028.
SB Energy will build and manage the facility at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus under a 20-year lease to OpenAI. SoftBank and SB Energy will construct power sources supporting 10 gigawatts of energy and invest at least $4.2 billion into regional grid infrastructure. Nvidia is separately putting $1.5 billion into SB Energy.
The Ohio deal formalizes a structure Nvidia has been negotiating with OpenAI for months. CNBC previously reported the two companies discussed a backstop of up to $250 billion that would enable OpenAI to raise debt for a 10-gigawatt buildout at the same site. That guarantee was reported last week to have been cut to less than $120 billion, and Monday's $105 billion figure sits inside that lower range.
“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.”— Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO
Key facts
- 01Nvidia will provide up to $105 billion in financing for an OpenAI data center in Pike City, Ohio, per a Monday securities filing.
- 02The credit supports an initial 4.25 gigawatts of compute, with an option for an additional 3.75 gigawatts on a 20-year lease to OpenAI.
- 03SB Energy and SoftBank will build power sources for 10 gigawatts and invest at least $4.2 billion into regional grid infrastructure.
- 04Nvidia is separately putting $1.5 billion into SB Energy; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was an early SB Energy investor.
- 05OpenAI projects 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 long-term positions, with capacity phasing online in 2028.
OpenAI has a stake in SB Energy, and Sam Altman was an early investor in the company. The overlapping ownership — Nvidia into SB Energy, OpenAI into SB Energy, Nvidia guaranteeing OpenAI's debt to lease the SB Energy site — is exactly the kind of arrangement that has drawn scrutiny of circular financing in the AI supply chain. Nvidia sells chips to OpenAI, backstops the debt OpenAI uses to buy those chips, and takes equity in the developer building the facility that houses them.
The Ohio commitment lands one week after Nvidia joined six large asset managers to launch financing platforms aimed at deploying $500 billion in third-party capital for data center projects. That vehicle spreads risk across outside investors; the Ohio guarantee keeps the exposure on Nvidia's own books. Both mechanisms exist because the compute bill for frontier AI has outrun what any single hyperscaler can fund from cash flow alone.
OpenAI framed the project in jobs terms, projecting 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 long-term positions at the Pike City campus. Greg Brockman, appearing on CNBC's Squawk Box, positioned the deal as basic resource acquisition rather than a discretionary expansion.
“Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age.”— Greg Brockman, OpenAI President
Brockman's framing tracks the broader industry posture. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have each announced multi-gigawatt infrastructure commitments in 2026, and every frontier developer is now competing for the same finite pool of grid capacity, transformer supply, and Nvidia allocation. Locking in a 20-year lease at 8 gigawatts of potential capacity is a bet that inference and training demand will keep scaling through the 2030s.
The Ohio site follows AI Chat Daily's coverage last week of Nvidia's earlier 4.25 GW commitment to OpenAI as part of a $600 billion compute partnership. Monday's filing puts a dollar figure and a legal structure on what had been described in principle — and clarifies that the financing runs through debt guarantees rather than direct equity.
The skeptical read is straightforward. Nvidia is now Nvidia's own largest customer's largest creditor, and the second-order exposure — to SB Energy, to SoftBank, to a specific parcel in southern Ohio, to 2028 delivery schedules on power and cooling infrastructure that has never been built at this scale — has no clean historical comp. If frontier model economics disappoint, Nvidia holds the bag on both the chip revenue and the loan guarantee. Reuters and CNBC both noted the guarantee had already been renegotiated downward once from the original $250 billion figure.
For OpenAI, the arrangement solves the constraint Brockman named. The company can commit to a 20-year compute footprint without carrying $100-billion-plus of new debt on its own balance sheet ahead of any IPO. For Nvidia, it locks in a multi-year buyer for its most expensive silicon and gives Jensen Huang a direct hand in where and how the next tranche of frontier compute gets built. The circular-financing critique is real, but so is the alternative — that no one else has both the willingness and the balance sheet to write a check this large, and the buildout happens anyway on terms Nvidia sets.
Working on something we should cover, or seeing a story we missed? Send leads, documents, or feedback to hello@aichatdaily.com. For sensitive tips, see our secure tips page for Signal and PGP options.
Spotted an error? Email hello@aichatdaily.com with the URL and the issue, or read our full corrections policy.
