Nvidia-OpenAI Ohio Data Center Financing Deal

The financing arrangement is structured as a lease guarantee, not a cash payment. Nvidia would be contractually obligated to cover OpenAI's roughly 20-year lease payments on the Ohio campus if OpenAI cannot, which makes the commitment a contingent liability on Nvidia's balance sheet rather than money changing hands upfront ^[1]. As one analysis of the mechanism put it, "Nvidia isn't putting $120 billion of its own cash on the table. It's offering to serve as a financial backstop, essentially co-signing on construction and lease obligations." ^[2]That guarantee covers only the data-center lease and construction-related debt - it does not include the cost of the Nvidia chips that will eventually fill the facility. Separately, Nvidia is discussing financing up to $350 billion of OpenAI's chip purchases, a distinct commitment from the lease backstop ^[3]. OpenAI needs the guarantee in the first place because it lacks an investment-grade credit rating and remains unprofitable despite an $852 billion valuation ^[4].

Reports of the arrangement first surfaced on July 27, 2026, when Nvidia and OpenAI were said to be discussing a guarantee worth roughly $250 billion, which immediately drew circular-financing criticism ^[5]and sent Nvidia shares down nearly 5% ^[6]. By mid-August, after investors raised concerns about Nvidia's risk exposure, the company scaled the guarantee back to under $120 billion - initially reported closer to $100 billion - with the reduced figure applying only to the first phase of the project; a deal could be signed as early as the weekend of August 14-16, 2026 ^[1][7]. Nvidia is separately weighing an investment of up to $3 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary building the campus, structured as roughly half at the signing of the Ohio agreement and half tied to SB Energy's planned IPO, which could come as soon as September 2026 and raise at least $5 billion ^[8].

Michael Burry, the investor known for shorting the AI buildout, summed up the skepticism in a single line: "Around and around we go. Nvidia to guarantee $200 billion of ChatGPT's spending on $NVDA chips." ^[9]Bloomberg Intelligence's Mandeep Singh offered a more sympathetic read of Nvidia's motive: "Nvidia wants the current pace of AI infrastructure construction to continue. Even a six-month pause in investment could pose significant risk to Nvidia." ^[10]The structure Nvidia is using here - a chipmaker backstopping a customer's data-center lease in exchange for continued chip demand - is not unique to this deal. AMD has reportedly taken a similar approach with Anthropic, backstopping that company's data-center leases in exchange for equity and chip-purchase commitments, suggesting Nvidia and OpenAI are following a playbook AMD and Anthropic have already tested rather than inventing one from scratch.

The Ohio guarantee is one piece of a larger Nvidia strategy to keep AI infrastructure spending flowing without carrying all of the financial risk itself. On August 12, 2026, Nvidia announced a partnership with financial institutions to launch compute-financing platforms aimed at raising over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure investment ^[1]. That effort sits alongside Jensen Huang's broader framing of Nvidia's roughly $500 billion compute commitment as a blend of Nvidia's own balance sheet and partners like SK Hynix, and alongside the view that Nvidia's backing gives banks the confidence to lend into AI infrastructure projects even when Nvidia is not the direct lender. The common thread is that Nvidia's credit, more than its cash, is becoming the load-bearing asset behind the AI buildout.

The campus sits on roughly 3,700 federally owned acres in Piketon, Pike County, Ohio, about 70 miles south of Columbus - the site of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility leased from the U.S. Department of Energy ^[11]. Full build-out targets 10 gigawatts of compute capacity, with an initial roughly 800-megawatt phase targeted for completion around early 2028, and on-site power will draw on 9.2 gigawatts of natural-gas generation developed with SB Energy ^[11]. Total project cost including chips could exceed $500 billion ^[12]- a figure that echoes the original Stargate initiative Oracle and SoftBank announced with OpenAI in January 2025, also billed as $500 billion and 10 gigawatts ^[13]. Beyond the companies already named, reporting has indicated Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has been closely involved in negotiations around the site, that Anthropic and Microsoft were also reportedly among the bidders for the Piketon location, and that part of the energy buildout is tied to ongoing US-Japan trade negotiations. Locally, the project has become a flashpoint in southern Ohio: residents have raised concerns about water usage, noise, rising electricity rates, and the impact on local land and wildlife habitat, and discussion has centered on a $33 billion natural-gas turbine plant tied to the site that one resident described as equivalent to nine nuclear reactors - a scale that has made the campus's power footprint, not just its financing, a point of local scrutiny. For context on the project's overall size, 10 gigawatts of demand is roughly comparable to half of the United Kingdom's total power demand.