NVIDIA Backs OpenAI's 8GW Ohio Data Center With Up to $105B Guarantee
The compute race has escalated to "who pays the power bill" territory — OpenAI is building an 8-gigawatt AI data center in Ohio, and on the ledger picking up the tab, NVIDIA's name is written in bold.
Three Key Facts
The biggest data center lease ever: OpenAI signed a 20-year lease with SB Energy and SoftBank Group to build the PORTS-Pike Technology Data Center in Pike County, Ohio. The project plans 800 megawatts online by 2028, with potential expansion to 10 gigawatts, sited on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. It's poised to be one of the largest AI data centers in the United States.
NVIDIA is both backer and supplier: NVIDIA is providing a financial guarantee of up to $105 billion to cover the lease and power payments, while serving as the exclusive chip provider for the data center and investing $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy. In other words, NVIDIA vouches for the landlord's credit on one hand and supplies all the hardware on the other — both sides of the deal.
Tens of thousands of jobs and a whole grid: The project is expected to create 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 long-term operating positions. SB Energy will fund grid upgrades and new transmission lines itself, avoiding costs passed to the state or ratepayers, and will use closed-loop, air-cooled water recirculation instead of the water-hogging cooling towers typical of data centers.
WangDou's Take
Read that ledger carefully. NVIDIA is tossing out a $105 billion guarantee to cover OpenAI's lease and power bills while being the exclusive chip supplier — that's the textbook "referee and player in one jersey." Selling GPUs makes the "shovel money," sure, but NVIDIA clearly isn't satisfied with that; it wants to be the general contractor of the whole mine. The problem: when a hardware vendor underwrites its biggest customer's credit, you've welded two companies' fates together. If OpenAI ever trips on its own ambition, that $105 billion guarantee is no joke. Don't be fooled by "no costs passed to users" — in the world of capital, there's no free $105 billion. That bill will find a home eventually; we just don't know whose signature goes on it.
Source: Washington Examiner on the NVIDIA-OpenAI data center deal