Nvidia has agreed to provide as much as $105 billion in financing to guarantee a massive new OpenAI data center campus in Ohio, the companies confirmed this week, in the chipmaker's largest single infrastructure commitment yet tied to its biggest AI customer.
The money backs land, power and shell infrastructure at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, which will be built and owned by SB Energy and leased exclusively to OpenAI for 20 years, according to Nvidia's announcement. The site will open with 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with an option to expand to 8 gigawatts, running exclusively on Nvidia chips — roughly 1.5 million GPUs that Nvidia says could represent $150 billion to $200 billion in potential revenue per hardware generation deployed there through 2030. Nvidia is separately investing $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy, and SB Energy and SoftBank plan to invest at least $4.2 billion in regional grid upgrades to support 10 gigawatts of power generation. OpenAI says the project will support 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent positions once capacity begins coming online in phases starting in 2028.
Answering the "circular financing" question
The Ohio deal adds to a fast-growing web of Nvidia commitments tied directly or indirectly to OpenAI, which together now approach roughly $600 billion in potential value, and lands in the same stretch as Nvidia's separate investments in Intel, Safe Superintelligence and SK Hynix, plus a $500 billion AI infrastructure financing vehicle Nvidia formed with BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Apollo Global Management. The pattern — a chip supplier financing the buildout that its own customers will fill with its own chips — has drawn recurring criticism from analysts who call it circular financing that flatters both companies' growth narratives without new outside capital entering the system.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has rejected that framing, arguing the company's actual financial exposure is narrower than the headline number suggests: Nvidia is on the hook for portions of lease and power payments tied to the site, he has said, not the full cost of construction or of OpenAI's separate obligations as tenant.
This is the same discipline we apply to supply-chain management: we secure critical inputs when we have visibility into customer demand.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO
For OpenAI, the deal is the latest step in a compute buildout that has outpaced almost every other company's capital spending plans, as the startup races to keep up with demand for ChatGPT and its enterprise API business while it remains dependent on outside financing and hardware guarantees to fund the data centers that demand requires. Investors will get their next real signal on how the arrangement is being priced when Nvidia next reports earnings and discloses how the Ohio commitment shows up on its balance sheet.
