Key Takeaways
Nvidia agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power payment obligations for an OpenAI data center in Pike County, Ohio, which OpenAI will lease for 20 years.
SB Energy will build, own and manage the campus, sized at 8 IT-gigawatts of compute backed by 10 gigawatts of new generation, with capacity phasing in from 2028.
The guarantee landed well below the roughly $250 billion Nvidia was weighing, and below an intermediate figure under $120 billion, which is the detail investors are reading hardest.
Nvidia said Monday it will guarantee as much as $105 billion in conditional lease and power payment obligations behind one of the largest data centers ever announced, a project OpenAI will lease for 20 years on the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio.
SB Energy is building, owning and managing the facility, on private land and federal property once used for uranium enrichment. The campus is sized at 8 IT-gigawatts of computing capacity supported by 10 gigawatts of new generation, and capacity is expected to come online in phases starting in 2028. Nvidia supplies the compute and is separately putting $1.5 billion into SB Energy. Ohio gets 35,000 construction jobs and about 2,500 permanent operating positions, according to CNBC.
The number that moved is the one that came down. Nvidia had been considering a guarantee of roughly $250 billion, cut it to under $120 billion, and settled at $105 billion, a $145 billion gap Fortune reads as a signal that the chipmaker is pulling back from underwriting demand for its own hardware.
That is the same question WYDE raised when Nvidia and six Wall Street firms committed $500 billion to finance AI infrastructure with compute as collateral. A guarantee is not a purchase. It is a promise to pay if the tenant cannot, which means the chipmaker is now carrying counterparty risk on the buildings that house its chips. The pattern here is hard to ignore, and it runs alongside deals like Anthropic's $9.1 billion compute lease with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms, where power, not silicon, is the scarce input.
Worth watching: whether the next guarantee is smaller still.
People Also Ask
How big is the OpenAI data center in Ohio?
It is sized at 8 IT-gigawatts of computing capacity, supported by 10 gigawatts of new power generation, on the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County. Capacity is expected to arrive in phases beginning in 2028.
What exactly did Nvidia commit?
Not a purchase. Nvidia agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power payment obligations owed to SB Energy, and separately to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy itself.
Why did Nvidia cut the guarantee?
Nvidia reduced the figure from roughly $250 billion to under $120 billion and then to $105 billion. Analysts read the reduction as caution about how much AI compute demand is genuine versus financed by the chip supplier.
How many jobs will the Ohio data center create?
About 35,000 construction jobs during the build and roughly 2,500 permanent operating positions once the campus is running.