Nvidia is putting major financial support behind OpenAI
Nvidia has agreed to provide as much as $105 billion of financial support for a massive new data center campus in Ohio that will be leased by OpenAI.
OpenAI said Monday it has entered into an agreement for up to roughly 8 gigawatts of computing capacity at the Pike County complex.
The first 800 megawatts are expected to become available by 2028.
For scale, one gigawatt can supply enough electricity to power as many as 750,000 US homes at a given time.
OpenAI will pay as the capacity comes online
OpenAI will not begin paying for the full project upfront.
The company said lease payments will begin as computing capacity becomes available.
Nvidia will provide support for defined portions of lease and power payments, helping make the project financially viable while securing another large deployment of Nvidia AI chips.
Nvidia had previously discussed providing as much as $250 billion in guarantees related to OpenAI’s data center lease, according to Bloomberg.
The structure disclosed this week is smaller, but still represents the largest financial backstop of its kind Nvidia has provided.
Nvidia is also investing directly in the developer
Separate from the OpenAI agreement, Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy Corp.
The SoftBank-backed company will build, own and operate the Ohio facility.
The project is also a major part of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son’s AI infrastructure push and has received support from the US administration as a large domestic investment project.
If fully built, the Pike County complex would rank among the largest data center campuses in the world.
Nvidia is financing more of the AI buildout
Nvidia has increasingly moved beyond simply selling GPUs.
The company has backed AI infrastructure companies including CoreWeave and made direct investments in OpenAI and Anthropic.
Those relationships help finance customers that are spending billions on data centers and Nvidia hardware.
The Ohio project takes that model much further. Nvidia is helping support lease and power obligations for a campus expected to house a huge deployment of its own chips.
The deal will add to circular financing scrutiny
Nvidia’s growing financial role in the AI ecosystem has drawn criticism over so-called circular financing.
The concern is that Nvidia provides capital or financial backing to AI companies and infrastructure providers that then use that money to purchase Nvidia hardware.
There are also questions around debt and lease obligations that may sit outside the traditional balance sheets of AI developers.
Nvidia rejected that characterization for the Ohio project.
“OpenAI will pay the lease,” the company said, arguing that the agreement should not be viewed as circular financing.
Eight gigawatts shows the scale OpenAI is targeting
The headline number is not only the $105 billion commitment.
It is the 8 gigawatts of planned compute capacity.
OpenAI is trying to secure enough power and infrastructure to support future generations of AI models at a scale far beyond today’s largest data centers.
The first 800 megawatts are targeted for 2028, with the rest expected to follow as the campus is built out.
For Nvidia, every new phase potentially means another large order of GPUs, networking equipment and AI systems.
For OpenAI, the deal locks in a path toward one of the largest concentrated pools of AI computing power being developed anywhere in the world.
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