Nvidia Backs $105 Billion in Financing for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center

Nvidia is putting serious money behind OpenAI's next big build. A securities filing revealed Monday that Nvidia will provide up to $105 billion in financing for a new AI data center OpenAI is standing up in Pike County, Ohio. The initial phase covers 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with room to grow by another 3.75 gigawatts, and Nvidia is the one supplying the compute itself. Capacity is expected to come online in phases starting in 2028.

SB Energy will build and run the facility at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus under a 20-year lease with OpenAI. There's a tangle of overlapping interests here worth sitting with: OpenAI has a stake in SB Energy, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was an early investor in the company too. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the arrangement as locking in durable infrastructure that can be upgraded generation after generation, each one supposedly delivering more intelligence for less cost.

The number has moved around a lot before landing here. CNBC had earlier reported Nvidia was weighing a backstop as large as $250 billion to help OpenAI raise debt for a 10-gigawatt buildout at this same Ohio site. Then the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nvidia was preparing to trim that guarantee down to under $120 billion. The $105 billion figure now on paper lands below even that reduced number.

This is just the newest entry in a string of financing arrangements Nvidia has struck to keep the AI data center boom fed, and it's exactly the kind of deal that's fueled worry about circular financing running through the AI trade — money flowing between the same small set of players in ways that make growth look more independent than it really is. Just last week, Nvidia partnered with six large asset managers to funnel $500 billion in outside capital into data center projects. On this Ohio deal specifically, SB Energy and SoftBank are committing to build power sources supporting 10 gigawatts and putting at least $4.2 billion into regional grid upgrades, while Nvidia is separately investing $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy.

OpenAI says the project will generate 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent roles once running. President Greg Brockman told CNBC's Squawk Box on Monday that compute has become the industry's defining constraint, calling it "the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age." Given how much of this financing structure ties Nvidia's own fortunes to OpenAI's ability to keep expanding, that line reads less like marketing and more like a plain description of the incentives at play.