Nvidia guarantees $105bn to lock OpenAI into Ohio

OpenAI has finalised a 20-year lease on a 10-gigawatt data centre campus in Pike County, Ohio, built and owned by SoftBank's SB Energy, and Nvidia is backstopping the deal with credit guarantees capped at $105 billion, according to regulatory filings reported by Axios and TechCrunch. That's down from the roughly $250 billion figure floated in July, suggesting Nvidia negotiated its exposure lower once the structure firmed up. Nvidia is also putting in $1.5 billion of equity into SB Energy and becomes the exclusive chip supplier for the site, which sits on Department of Energy land and targets first operations around 2028. The arrangement means Nvidia isn't just selling GPUs into the AI buildout, it's financing the real estate those GPUs sit in, which ties its balance sheet to data centre completion risk in a way chip sales alone never did. Total build cost for the full 10GW campus is estimated north of $500 billion.