A Guarantee, Not an Investment
The nature of this money is easy to misread. Nvidia is not spending $105 billion to build a data center. It signed a conditional guarantee: SB Energy builds, owns and operates the campus, OpenAI takes a 20-year lease and pays rent and power on schedule, and if OpenAI defaults, Nvidia covers the gap between the guaranteed minimum value and whatever the owner recovers by re-leasing or selling the site. Nvidia's own framing is blunt — OpenAI pays the lease; the guarantee covers a portion of lease and power payments plus a minimum-value commitment on the site, not the project's construction cost. The conditions are equally explicit. The credit supports an initial 4.25GW of compute, with an option for another 3.75GW, and capacity comes online in phases around 2028. OpenAI describes the deal as securing up to roughly 8GW from the campus, with the first 800MW expected in 2028. The site sits in Pike County, Ohio, on private land plus a federal parcel formerly used for uranium enrichment. Nvidia is the exclusive chip supplier to the site and is separately investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy.
The Number Came Down from Earlier Reports
This deal has had several versions. CNBC once reported Nvidia was discussing a backstop of up to $250 billion; the Wall Street Journal then reported it had been cut to under $120 billion and limited to the first phase, after investors raised concerns about Nvidia's exposure on large financing commitments. The $105 billion that landed in the securities filing is less than half the original figure and is explicitly tied to first-phase capacity. Power for the site is SB Energy and SoftBank's responsibility; the two will also put at least $4.2 billion into regional grid infrastructure.
Watch the Return Schedule
For developers, nothing changes in the near term — a facility that gets power in 2028 does not affect today's quotas or prices. The question is how long this structure holds. A chip vendor guarantees its customer's lease, the customer uses that credit to finance buying the vendor's chips, and the return depends on OpenAI's future cash flow. Nvidia's leadership has said the first 4.25GW phase alone could contribute roughly $200 billion in revenue — a figure that assumes the lease is honored on schedule. That is where the skepticism sits too: AI deals are increasingly nested inside one another, and whether the spending produces decent returns will only be visible much later.
via: CNBC, Bloomberg, Axios, The Information