Nvidia's $105B Ohio Data Center Deal With OpenAI and SB Energy

By late July 2026, reports had Nvidia and OpenAI negotiating a jaw-dropping backstop of up to $250 billion to fund OpenAI's data center ambitions ^[1]- a number so large it rattled Nvidia's stock. Three weeks later, when Nvidia, OpenAI and SB Energy formally announced the Ports-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, the guarantee that emerged was smaller and more specific: up to $105 billion in credit support covering defined portions of OpenAI's lease and power payments, plus a separate $1.5 billion direct equity investment in SB Energy ^[2].

The scaled-back structure matters because of what it signals about risk appetite. Nvidia is not writing OpenAI a blank check: the campus itself is being built in stages, with an initial 4.25-gigawatt deployment and a further 3.75 gigawatts held as an option rather than a certainty, out of a total planned 8 gigawatts across the site ^[2][3]. Reading that staged buildout against the earlier $250 billion figure suggests Nvidia and OpenAI opted for a more conservative structure after the initial number spooked markets - trading one kind of risk (headline size) for another (multi-year execution risk spread across a 20-year lease).

The most persistent criticism of the deal is structural: Nvidia is guaranteeing payments for a customer that will spend much of that money buying Nvidia's own AI compute systems, since Nvidia is the site's exclusive supplier ^[2]. Critics have compared the arrangement to circular financing, arguing it lets Nvidia effectively fund its own downstream revenue. Jensen Huang has pushed back directly, arguing that OpenAI - not Nvidia - remains contractually responsible for the underlying lease and power payments, and that Nvidia's role is a conditional guarantee rather than direct funding of OpenAI's chip purchases ^[3].

That rebuttal has not settled the debate. On finance-focused corners of the internet, the dominant reaction has stayed skeptical, with some estimating Nvidia stands to earn hundreds of billions in chip revenue from OpenAI's compute buildout over the rest of the decade - the kind of arithmetic that makes a 'guarantee' look less like insurance and more like a subsidized sales pipeline.

Forbes contributor Ashish Bhatia frames the Ohio deal as evidence that Nvidia's core bottleneck has shifted from chip supply to physical infrastructure. 'Chips can be manufactured in months. A gigawatt-scale grid interconnect takes years,' he writes, arguing Nvidia is repositioning itself as a vertically integrated guarantor of sites, power and shells rather than a pure component vendor ^[4]. Huang's own language echoes the point: 'AI is becoming infrastructure - the foundation for intelligence in every industry - and land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI' ^[2].

That pivot carries real balance-sheet exposure. Bhatia notes Nvidia's guarantee covers 'defined portions of lease and power payments, along with a specified residual-value commitment' over a 20-year term ^[4]- a multi-decade liability that is unusual for a company whose business has historically been built around multi-quarter product cycles, not multi-decade real estate and energy commitments.

The Ports-Pike site is built partly on the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a former Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility in Pike County ^[5]. Redeveloping that land lets the project reuse existing infrastructure ties rather than starting on greenfield property, and both companies are pairing the buildout with an initial $80 million combined community grant fund ($40 million each from Nvidia and OpenAI) plus a projected 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent positions ^[3][5].

That framing has landed very differently depending on the audience. Local Ohio coverage and officials have largely welcomed the project as a rare economic win for one of the state's less prosperous counties, contrasting it with the community opposition data centers have drawn elsewhere in the US. Financially oriented and Columbus-area online discussion has been more skeptical, questioning whether the construction-job figure will translate into local hiring rather than out-of-state contractors, and raising concerns about the roughly 9.2 gigawatts of new on-site natural gas generation the project requires. SB Energy has committed to funding the associated grid upgrades - at least $4.2 billion - in full, so the costs are not passed on to ratepayers ^[5][6], and the campus will use closed-loop, air-cooled cooling systems rather than continuous-draw cooling towers to limit water use ^[5].