Nvidia will provide up to $105 billion in financing for an OpenAI data center in Pike County, Ohio, according to a securities filing, with SB Energy building and managing the facility through a 20-year lease beginning in phases in 2028.
Nvidia will provide up to $105 billion in financing for a new artificial intelligence data center for OpenAI in Pike County, Ohio, according to a securities filing disclosed Monday — the chipmaker's latest move to support a rapidly expanding AI infrastructure buildout.
The credit and compute package will support an initial 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with an option for an additional 3.75 gigawatts. Capacity is expected to come online in phases beginning in 2028.
SB Energy will build and manage the facility at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus through a 20-year lease to OpenAI. The frontier lab holds a stake in SB Energy, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was also an early investor 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 with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a release.
The Ohio agreement is a scaled-back version of an earlier arrangement. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nvidia was set to reduce a previously discussed guarantee — which had been reported at up to $250 billion — to less than $120 billion for the buildout.
The Ohio deal is part of a broader financing offensive by Nvidia. Last week, the company teamed up with six large asset managers to build financing platforms intended to deploy $500 billion in third-party capital for datacenter projects, underscoring the scale of capital now flowing into AI infrastructure.
As part of the Ohio arrangement, SB Energy and SoftBank will develop power sources supporting 10 gigawatts of energy and commit at least $4.2 billion to regional grid infrastructure. Nvidia will also invest $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy.
OpenAI said the facility is projected to support 35,000 new construction jobs through 2032 and create 2,500 long-term positions.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday that compute has become a defining constraint for the industry. "Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age," he said.
The deal comes as Nvidia's expanding role as a financier — not merely a chip supplier — has drawn scrutiny over what some analysts have described as circular financing dynamics in the AI sector. Nvidia provides chips, then helps fund the infrastructure built around those same chips, reinforcing demand for its own products even as it takes on balance-sheet exposure to the buildout it is enabling.
The Ohio project reflects the scale of capital commitments now underpinning the AI race, with compute access increasingly shaping competitive positioning among frontier labs.
Marc Sabatini is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering enterprise software, cybersecurity, and the regulatory beats that shape both. He focuses on the deal flow and policy decisions that move markets.
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