Nvidia Corp. has agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion [1] in lease-payment obligations for OpenAI’s planned data center in Ohio.
This agreement secures the financing necessary for OpenAI to build one of the world's largest AI compute facilities. By backing the lease, Nvidia ensures that its primary customer has the infrastructure required to run the next generation of generative AI models on Nvidia hardware.
The project is located in Pike County, Ohio, where SB Energy, a firm backed by SoftBank, is developing the AI campus [2]. As part of the broader arrangement, Nvidia has also made a direct investment of $1.5 billion [4] into SB Energy.
Reports on the facility's total power capacity vary. The Los Angeles Times reported the campus will provide roughly eight gigawatts [2] of computing capacity, while Yahoo Finance cited a figure of 4.25 gigawatts [3].
The deal, announced Monday, Aug. 17, 2026 [1], represents a deepening of the infrastructure partnership between the chip giant and the AI developer. The guarantee allows OpenAI to mitigate the financial risk of leasing such a massive facility, which requires unprecedented amounts of electricity and specialized cooling.
Nvidia's role extends beyond providing the H100 or Blackwell chips that power these centers. By guaranteeing the lease, Nvidia is effectively underwriting the physical environment where its technology will reside—a move that ties the chipmaker's financial success directly to the operational scale of OpenAI.
“Nvidia has agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in lease-payment obligations.”
This partnership signals a shift in the AI industry where chip providers are no longer just vendors, but financial anchors for their clients. By guaranteeing $105 billion in leases, Nvidia is ensuring the creation of a guaranteed market for its hardware while helping OpenAI bypass the traditional financing hurdles associated with gigawatt-scale infrastructure. This move further consolidates the power of the Nvidia-OpenAI axis in the global AI arms race.
