Nvidia Backs $105 Billion in Financing for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center Campus

Nvidia disclosed Monday that it will back as much as $105 billion in financing for a new OpenAI data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, according to a securities filing reviewed by Bloomberg. The number is notable partly for what it is and partly for how far it traveled to get there.

Reported talks had pegged the guarantee as high as $250 billion. Reuters cited people familiar with the matter when the Wall Street Journal reported on August 14 that Nvidia had already cut the figure to less than $120 billion. By the time the deal was signed, the companies settled on $105 billion. Fortune, which tracked the two known checkpoints, noted that Nvidia disclosed the final number as an "aggregate payment obligation" capped at $105 billion in the SEC filing tied to the announcement.

The structure of the deal is worth understanding before reaching for the scale of the dollar figures. Nvidia isn't simply writing a check to OpenAI. SB Energy, the SoftBank unit, will build and own the site, known as the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus. OpenAI will lease it for 20 years. Nvidia is financing land, power, and the shell of the facility, and separately making a $1.5 billion equity investment in SB Energy, according to reporting by CNBC.

In return, OpenAI committed to using Nvidia chips exclusively at the Ohio site. That exclusivity clause is the architecture decision buried in this deal. Nvidia isn't just a chip vendor here; it's a lender whose collateral is a captive customer. The complex could eventually house roughly 1.5 million GPUs, which Nvidia said could represent $150 billion to $200 billion in potential revenue per generation deployed through 2030, per Yahoo Finance.

The compute plan is phased. Initial capacity is set at 4.25 gigawatts, with an option to expand by another 3.75 gigawatts, per Bloomberg's reporting on the filing. The first 800 megawatts are expected online by 2028. At full 8-gigawatt build-out, that's enough load to power roughly six million U.S. homes simultaneously, according to Bloomberg's own back-of-envelope on the facility's scale.

The investor concern Fortune surfaced is worth stating plainly: Nvidia finances customers who then buy Nvidia hardware. The company has been doing versions of this for years, investing in AI companies and data center operators whose primary purchases are Nvidia accelerators, then layering financing arrangements on top. CEO Jensen Huang pushed back on that framing in a press statement, describing the Ohio project as "securing long-lived infrastructure for Nvidia compute" with upgrade cycles built in. That's a real argument. It's also one Nvidia has an obvious incentive to make.

The deal's descent from $250 billion to $105 billion matters for a structural reason. The Wall Street Journal reported that the reduction came after investors raised concerns about Nvidia's risk exposure. Nvidia had also just partnered with six major financial institutions to launch compute-financing platforms aimed at raising over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure, per Reuters. In other words, the company is actively trying to move financing risk off its own balance sheet at the same moment it's guaranteeing a nine-figure commitment. Those two moves aren't contradictory, but they do describe the same underlying pressure.

The missing number in all of this is the power contract. An 8-gigawatt site doesn't fill itself with electricity, and that supply chain, transmission rights, grid interconnection queues, is where projects like this have historically stalled. The filing reviewed by Bloomberg confirms the compute commitment. It doesn't resolve the power timeline.

Sources cited:
- Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-17/nvidia-to-invest-up-to-105-billion-for-openai-data-center-in-ohio)
- Fortune (https://fortune.com/2026/08/18/openai-data-center-deal-with-nvidia-comes-in-145-billion-lower-than-reportedsignaling-concerns-of-artificial-demand-for-chips/)
- CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/nvidia-financing-open-ai-data-center-ohio.html)
- Reuters (https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/nvidia-scales-back-250-billion-234356524.html)
- Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/nvidia-inks-105-billion-deal-for-openai-data-center-190524832.html)