Nvidia will provide up to $105 billion in financing guarantees for a new OpenAI artificial intelligence data centre at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike City, Ohio, according to a securities filing released Monday. The deal — described by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as securing “long-lived infrastructure” for the AI era — is the largest single infrastructure financing commitment in the company’s history and one of the largest in the history of the technology industry.
SB Energy will build and manage the facility under a 20-year lease to OpenAI. The initial deployment will support 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with an option for Nvidia to extend the arrangement by a further 3.75 gigawatts. The first phases of capacity are expected to come online in 2028. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was an early investor in SB Energy, and OpenAI itself holds a stake 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,” Huang said in a statement.
What Nvidia Is Actually Guaranteeing — and Why
Nvidia’s public statement on the deal was unusually detailed about the financial structure, specifically to address concerns about what critics have called circular financing — a pattern in which Nvidia effectively finances customers to buy Nvidia products.
Nvidia is clear that it is not guaranteeing the full cost of the Ohio site or all of OpenAI’s obligations. Its support covers defined portions of lease and power payments alongside a residual value commitment, and its exposure declines as OpenAI makes lease payments and capacity comes online. “OpenAI will pay the lease,” Nvidia said.
The company frames the deal as an extension of its existing approach to supply chain management — securing critical inputs when it has visibility into long-term demand. In this case, the critical input is land, power, and shell infrastructure (LPS), which Nvidia identifies as an emerging strategic constraint on AI deployment alongside chips, memory, and networking.
Nvidia’s argument is that PORTS-Pike is not a one-client or one-generation site. Because Nvidia compute runs on CUDA — its proprietary software platform — its chips are versatile, fungible, and can be redeployed to other qualified tenants if OpenAI does not continue using the facility. The company says this makes the Ohio site a productive long-term asset rather than an OpenAI-specific bet.
The Scale of the AI Infrastructure Buildout
The numbers embedded in the deal reveal how large the opportunity has become. Each generation of Nvidia GPU systems deployed at PORTS-Pike could represent approximately 1.5 million chips, or roughly $150 billion to $200 billion in Nvidia revenue. Over the 20-year term, with multiple upgrade cycles, the site could support an extraordinary volume of compute turnover.
More broadly, OpenAI has committed to substantial Nvidia infrastructure deployments through 2030. OpenAI’s existing and planned commitments represent approximately 12 gigawatts of Nvidia compute, with the potential to expand to 16 gigawatts if the Ohio arrangement is extended. Nvidia says that opportunity represents roughly $600 billion in compute through 2030.
OpenAI said the project will support 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 long-term positions. SB Energy and SoftBank will build power infrastructure supporting 10 gigawatts of energy and invest at least $4.2 billion in grid infrastructure for the region. Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy as part of the arrangement.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman described the logic simply. “Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age.”
The Circular Financing Question
The PORTS-Pike deal is the latest in a series of large Nvidia financing moves. Last week, Nvidia arranged $500 billion in financing for customers to purchase its hardware for data centre projects. The Ohio arrangement had originally been discussed at up to $250 billion before being reduced. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nvidia was set to cap the guarantee at less than $120 billion, with Monday’s filing confirming $105 billion.
The concern about circular financing — that Nvidia is effectively lending customers money to buy Nvidia products — has attracted scrutiny from analysts including Jim Cramer, who has compared the pattern to the dynamics of the dot-com bubble. Nvidia disputes the characterisation directly, arguing that the Ohio deal is a disciplined infrastructure play with genuine fungibility rather than a round-trip transaction.
Whether markets agree will depend significantly on whether the AI infrastructure buildout produces the sustained demand — and revenue — that the investment requires.
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