Updated Oct. 26, 2026, 6:32 a.m. ET: Adds that Nvidia’s Aug. 26 quarterly filing included a form of the guarantee, without the guaranteed minimum values.
Nvidia has found a new way to sell GPUs to OpenAI: stand behind the building they go in. The chipmaker said Monday it will provide residual-value guarantees, capped at $105 billion, for SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, which OpenAI will lease for 20 years.
The headline number is easy to misread. Nvidia isn’t spending $105 billion. According to its SEC filing, as Data Center Knowledge explained, Nvidia would cover the shortfall between a guaranteed minimum value and what SB Energy recovers by re-leasing or selling the facilities if OpenAI defaults or goes insolvent. OpenAI has agreed to reimburse Nvidia for anything it pays out. The cash Nvidia is actually putting in is a $1.5 billion investment in SB Energy, which already counts SoftBank and OpenAI as investors.
What gets built
The guarantees cover an initial 4.25 gigawatts of IT capacity, and Nvidia has an option to back another 3.75 GW, for roughly 8 GW in total. SB Energy will build, own and operate the campus on the site of the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a former uranium enrichment facility. Capacity is due to come online in phases starting in 2028, Nvidia’s announcement said. The campus will exclusively host Nvidia’s DSX platform, covering GPUs, CPUs and networking.
SB Energy and SoftBank have committed to at least 10 GW of new generation and at least $4.2 billion in regional grid upgrades through a partnership with AEP Ohio that the companies say is designed to protect ratepayers. OpenAI is adding $40 million to SB Energy’s $40 million community benefits fund.
“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 the release.
A smaller backstop than first discussed
The final figure is well below earlier talk. CNBC had reported that Nvidia was discussing a backstop of up to $250 billion for a 10-gigawatt buildout, and the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the figure would come in under $120 billion. The deal adds to concerns about circular financing in AI, where chip suppliers help fund the customers buying their chips.
Analysts see a logic in it anyway. “NVIDIA is realizing, in the same way that Ford Finance does with Ford’s vehicles, that GPUs have a residual value long after the initial three years of use,” Steven Dickens of HyperFrame Research told Data Center Knowledge. Turning that value into something lenders can underwrite, he argued, “unlocks capital for the AI build-out.”
OpenAI President Greg Brockman put the demand side more bluntly on CNBC: “Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age.”
The details that would show how much financing the guarantee really unlocks are still private. Nvidia’s quarterly filing on Aug. 26 included the form of the residual-value guaranty and listed $105 billion in maximum exposure to SB Energy, but as a form document, with some terms redacted, it doesn’t show the guaranteed minimum values that would set Nvidia’s real exposure.
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