NVIDIA Commits Up to $105B Guarantee; OpenAI-SoftBank Ohio 10GW Mega-Campus Breaks Ground This Month

Nvidia will provide up to $105 billion in financing for a new artificial intelligence data center for OpenAI in Ohio, according to a securities filing revealed Monday.

The credit will support an initial 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity with an option for an additional 3.75 gigawatts. Nvidia will provide the compute, with capacity expected to come online in phases in 2028.

SB Energy will build and manage the datacenter at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, through a 20-year lease to OpenAI. OpenAI has a stake in SB Energy, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was an early investor in the company.

"We are securing long-lived infrastructure for NVIDIA compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories that can be upgraded repeatedly with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

The deal represents Nvidia's latest financing maneuver to support the sprawling AI data center buildout. CNBC previously reported that Nvidia was discussing a backstop guarantee of up to $250 billion for the 10-gigawatt project. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Nvidia cut that guarantee to less than $120 billion. Last week, Nvidia teamed up with six large asset managers to build financing platforms deploying $500 billion in third-party capital for datacenter projects.

As part of the Ohio deal, SB Energy and SoftBank will build power sources supporting 10 gigawatts of energy and invest at least $4.2 billion into regional grid infrastructure. Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy. OpenAI said the new data center will support 35,000 new construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 long-term positions.

The new facility will give OpenAI greater access to the high-end chips and computing power that underlay the entire AI architecture. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday that compute is a "fundamental resource" for the industry. "Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age," he said.

*Correction: The data center project is in Pike County, Ohio, not Pike City.*