Nvidia’s Ohio AI Data Center Guarantee: Up to $105B

What Nvidia actually promised

Nvidia's own announcement describes its role as credit support on the "land, power and shell" buildout for the campus's initial 4.25 gigawatt phase, with an option to take the remaining 3.75 gigawatts once the full 8 gigawatts is built. Axios, reading the underlying SEC filing, put a sharper edge on it: Nvidia guaranteed up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power payment obligations to SB Energy. [1][3]

Atlas interpretation: A guarantee is not the same thing as Nvidia writing SB Energy a $105 billion check. It is closer to Nvidia co-signing OpenAI's lease: Nvidia only pays if OpenAI does not, and the obligation exists precisely to reassure lenders and SB Energy that the buildout gets paid for regardless of how OpenAI's finances look in 2028. Jensen Huang said on X that this is not circular financing because "OpenAI will pay the lease." That is true as stated, but it describes the intended outcome, not the risk the guarantee was built to absorb if OpenAI cannot. [3]

The number moved before it settled. CNBC had previously reported Nvidia was discussing a backstop of up to $250 billion for a 10 gigawatt build at the same Ohio site, and the Wall Street Journal reported that figure cut to under $120 billion the week before this announcement. The deal that closed guarantees $105 billion against 8 gigawatts, smaller on both the dollar and the gigawatt count than what had been floated. [2]

A separate bet on the landlord

Apart from the guarantee, Nvidia is putting $1.5 billion of equity directly into SB Energy, the company that will build, own and operate the campus. That is Nvidia buying a stake in the landlord, not credit support for a tenant's lease, and Nvidia described it as backing SB Energy's growth into an AI infrastructure developer. [2][3]

SB Energy is majority backed by SoftBank Group. CNBC also reported that OpenAI itself holds a stake in SB Energy, and that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was an early personal investor in the company. The guarantor, the tenant and the landlord are not arm's length strangers; several of the same names sit on more than one side of the table. [2]

Atlas interpretation: This is the shape critics point to when they call AI infrastructure spending circular: a small set of companies and their executives hold stakes in each other's suppliers and customers, so a dollar that looks like independent revenue on one balance sheet is often backstopped, a few steps removed, by the same handful of parties. It is the same worry that trailed Nvidia's compute financing platforms with six asset managers a week earlier, where Nvidia's own chips became the collateral behind $500 billion of third-party lending. [2]

What OpenAI actually signed

OpenAI signed a 20 year lease with SB Energy for capacity at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, built on the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a former federal uranium enrichment site. The first 4.25 gigawatt phase is due online in 2028, with the option to expand to 8 gigawatts total. SB Energy and SoftBank committed to build at least 10 gigawatts of new power generation and invest at least $4.2 billion in regional grid infrastructure to supply it. [3][1]

OpenAI said the project would support 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent operating positions once running. [2]

Why a chip company underwrites real estate

Atlas interpretation: Nvidia does not build data centers and has no ordinary reason to guarantee financing for land, power and shell construction on someone else's campus. It has one specific reason here: Nvidia is the exclusive chip provider to this site. A gigawatt of data center capacity that never gets financed and built is a gigawatt of Nvidia chips that never gets sold, so Nvidia's guarantee is not really a real estate bet. It is a way to make sure the capacity exists at all, regardless of which lender or landlord ends up owning the risk of getting it financed. [1]

Huang framed the same logic as durability rather than volume: the deal secures, in his words, long lived infrastructure for Nvidia compute so that OpenAI can deploy AI factories that get upgraded repeatedly as new chip generations arrive. A campus built to Nvidia's specification and locked into a 20 year lease with Nvidia as sole chip supplier is a customer Nvidia does not have to win again with each new product cycle. [2]

Atlas interpretation: Read against the compute financing platforms Nvidia announced a week earlier, the pattern is vertical integration moving down the stack: rather than waiting for data center operators to independently raise the capital to build out demand for its chips, Nvidia is using its own balance sheet and credit standing to make that capacity happen directly. The chip company has a stake in more compute existing, full stop, regardless of who technically owns or finances the building it sits in. [1]