Nvidia's $105B OpenAI Deal: The Ohio Guarantee, Explained

Nvidia has agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in financing for the first phase of an OpenAI data-center campus in Pike County, Ohio — disclosed on August 17 in an SEC filing and simultaneous company announcements, with same-day reporting from Bloomberg and others. The number is smaller than the $250 billion first floated in July, the money is contingent rather than up-front, and the structure says as much about how the AI build-out is being financed as the headline figure does.

What Nvidia actually signed

Strip the headline verbs — “invest,” “back,” “finance” — and the filing describes a guarantee. SB Energy, a SoftBank Group subsidiary, will build, own and operate the campus; an OpenAI affiliate leases it for 20 years; and Nvidia stands behind up to $105 billion of the debt raised to build the first phase, per CNBC and the SEC filing.

The trigger matters. Reporting on the filing describes a post-default, residual-value structure: Nvidia owes nothing unless OpenAI misses its lease obligations, and even then only after the site has been re-leased or sold and the recovery counted, per TNW’s read of the disclosure. Lenders are effectively underwriting Nvidia’s balance sheet instead of OpenAI’s — which is the whole point, because it makes tens of billions of project debt cheaper to raise.

Two smaller pieces rode along in the same announcement, per Nvidia’s release: a direct $1.5 billion Nvidia investment in SB Energy itself, and exclusivity — the campus will run Nvidia AI compute only. “Now is the time to scale the AI infrastructure that will power the next industrial revolution,” CEO Jensen Huang said in the release.

From $250 billion to $105 billion in three weeks

The number that closed is not the number that leaked. On July 27, CNBC reported talks over a backstop of up to $250 billion for a campus then described at ten gigawatts. Investors balked at the exposure, and reporting credited to the Wall Street Journal described the guarantee being scaled back to under $120 billion, covering only the opening phase. The final disclosed figure landed at $105 billion, per Bloomberg.

The pushback had a public face. Short seller Michael Burry has spent the summer attacking Nvidia’s customer-financing web — calling a separate half-trillion-dollar financing consortium a “Wall Street stunt” with “shades of Enron”, and warning in July that circular spending was reaching “biblical proportions” as the cost of insuring Nvidia’s debt climbed. Nvidia felt compelled to send analysts a seven-page memo denying it engages in “vendor financing,” per CNBC — which noted Wall Street is not sure the memo settles it. Huang has been blunter: asked whether the deal is circular, he answered on X that “OpenAI will pay the lease,” per Axios.

A uranium plant, eight gigawatts and a 20-year lease

The site is the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, just south of Piketon — the grounds of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War uranium-enrichment complex, much of it remediated federal land still controlled by the U.S. Department of Energy, per WOSU Public Media and a DOE fact sheet. OpenAI’s lease covers up to roughly eight gigawatts of computing capacity: an initial 4.25 GW slice — the part Nvidia’s guarantee covers — plus an option for 3.75 GW more, with the first capacity expected online in 2028, per CNBC. “This is going to be a huge site,” Sam Altman said in OpenAI’s announcement, which leans hard on Pike County being “once again at the heart of American industry.”

One clarification worth having, because coverage keeps blurring it: Ohio now hosts two separate OpenAI-linked projects. Lordstown, announced in 2025 with SoftBank among OpenAI’s five Stargate expansion sites, is a different campus in a different county from this Pike County deal. SB Energy frames PORTS-Pike as advancing the same Stargate program, but the Aug 17 materials stop short of formally branding it a Stargate site.

The announcement-day job numbers — about 35,000 construction jobs through the build-out and roughly 2,500 permanent roles — come from the companies themselves, per the Dayton Daily News, and should be read as projections. The power question is harder than the jobs question. Earlier reporting on the project described plans for up to ten gigawatts of new on-site generation, most of it natural gas, per Data Center Dynamics — in a state where the local utility, AEP Ohio, already faces interconnection requests several times its historical peak load and has had a data-center tariff in force since 2025 to keep those costs off households. Goldman Sachs projects US data-center power demand roughly doubling between 2025 and 2027, with a structural shortfall opening this decade. Grid strain and local pushback are exactly the forces we tracked in our earlier reporting on the data-center backlash from Nashville to Vizag; here, the developer says it will pay grid-upgrade and transmission costs in full rather than passing them to Ohio ratepayers.

The tally: what Nvidia has committed to OpenAI

No single outlet has put the running total in one place, so here it is — with the closed, the announced and the merely-negotiated kept separate. The dollar figures below are drawn from the linked reporting in this article and from Bloomberg’s running map of AI circular deals; the sums are our arithmetic.

The pattern in the first three rows is easy to miss: the famous September 2025 pledge of up to $100 billion was never executed as announced. It stalled by January, per Bloomberg, and was replaced by a $30 billion direct equity stake in OpenAI’s funding round in February, per CNBC. Add the Ohio guarantee and the SB Energy stake, and Nvidia’s agreed OpenAI-related commitments now total about $136.5 billion — our arithmetic on the sourced figures above. The two “in talks” rows, reported by 24/7 Wall St alongside the announcement, would take the relationship past half a trillion dollars if they close. They have not closed, and the July-to-August history above is a live demonstration that reported figures shrink.

What it means

Vendor financing — a supplier funding its customers’ purchases — is not new, and it is not automatically a scandal. The dot-com cautionary tale is specific: Lucent and Nortel lent billions to telecom customers to buy their gear, booked the sales as revenue, and collapsed when the customers did, a history finance commentators keep pressing against Nvidia’s deals. The honest difference: Nvidia’s Ohio exposure is contingent and sits behind a hard asset on federal land, not unsecured loans to startups. The honest similarity: in both eras, the supplier’s own capital helps manufacture the demand that justifies its valuation — Bloomberg’s tally of the wider web runs to roughly $46 billion in equity and $879 billion in purchase commitments circulating among eleven companies. We saw a smaller version of the same entanglement in AMD’s warrant-laced compute deal with Anthropic.

The deeper question is on the tenant’s side of the lease. OpenAI’s revenue run rate topped $40 billion in August, per Bloomberg, and its valuation reached $852 billion in an employee share sale that closed a week ago, per CNBC. Against that, Sam Altman has cited around $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments over eight years, per TechRepublic. A twenty-year lease on a campus this size is a bet that the revenue curve we charted in the frontier labs’ race to report growth keeps compounding for two decades. Nvidia guaranteeing the debt is what makes lenders willing to take that bet today — and what concentrates the pain at Nvidia if the curve bends. That is the trade big tech keeps making this year: pull the build-out forward, carry the tail risk on your own balance sheet.

What to watch

The two unsigned pieces — the credit support and the much larger GPU financing line reported to be in negotiation — are the tell for whether August’s discipline was real or cosmetic. Watch whether OpenAI exercises the 3.75 GW option, and on what terms; whether the first capacity actually lands in 2028; and how AEP Ohio’s tariff politics evolve as manufacturers contest the utility’s load forecasts. Nvidia’s next earnings call is the natural venue for the first hard analyst questions on how a contingent guarantee of this size is disclosed and reserved. And if OpenAI’s long-trailed public listing draws closer, an audited prospectus would put real numbers under the leases that today exist only in announcements.