Nvidia Guarantees $105B for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center

Nvidia disclosed on August 17 that it will provide credit support of up to roughly $105 billion behind OpenAI's lease of a new AI data center campus in Pike County, Ohio — one of the largest single infrastructure commitments yet made in the AI buildout. The arrangement was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on a Form 8-K. SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer, will build, own and operate the site and lease it to OpenAI for 20 years.

The campus, called PORTS-Pike, starts at 4.25 IT-gigawatts of what Nvidia describes as AI factory capacity, with an option held by Nvidia to add the remaining 3.75 IT-GW for a total of 8. Capacity is expected to come online in phases beginning in 2028. Nvidia is the exclusive compute supplier for the site, and is separately putting $1.5 billion of equity into SB Energy.

Power, not silicon, is the binding constraint on a project this size, and the filing addresses it directly. SB Energy and SoftBank have committed to building at least 10 GW of new generation to serve the campus, alongside roughly $4.2 billion of regional grid investment in partnership with AEP Ohio. The site itself is a piece of industrial reclamation: it sits on the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility in Appalachian Ohio. An $80 million community benefits fund is attached, half of it contributed by OpenAI.

The structure is the clearest example yet of a pattern that has drawn scrutiny all year: Nvidia underwriting the infrastructure that will be filled with Nvidia chips, and in doing so underwriting the demand for them. Chief executive Jensen Huang framed it as securing scarce physical inputs rather than manufacturing demand, saying land, power and shell "have become vital in the age of AI." Skeptics read the same filing as circular financing, in which the chipmaker's balance sheet quietly backstops its customers' ability to buy.

The number is also notably smaller than what had been reported in July, when The Information described talks over a backstop of roughly $250 billion for OpenAI's Ohio plans, plus far more for chips — a story BitsMinds covered at the time in Nvidia May Guarantee $250 Billion So OpenAI Can Buy Nvidia Chips. The gap is partly one of scope: the 8-K covers credit support for this campus lease specifically, not the whole of Nvidia's exposure to OpenAI. What changed is that a reported negotiation is now a disclosed obligation with a dollar figure and a counterparty.

Nothing at PORTS-Pike produces a token until 2028 at the earliest, which is the part worth holding onto. The financing is real now; the compute is a bet on demand three years out, made by a company whose shareholders have already priced in a great deal of it.