Nvidia Cuts Its OpenAI Ohio Data Center Guarantee Below $120 Billion and Buys Into the Developer Instead

Network switch rack in a data center

Nvidia has quietly redrawn the financial map of the biggest data center project ever proposed. The chipmaker is now expected to backstop less than $120 billion of OpenAI's planned 10-gigawatt campus in Ohio, down from the $250 billion guarantee it discussed in July, and it is separately negotiating a stake of up to $3 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary that would build the site. The Information first reported the investment talks on Saturday, and the Wall Street Journal broke the guarantee scale-back on Friday, citing people familiar with the discussions.

The moves amount to a shift in how Nvidia finances AI buildouts. Instead of placing one giant bet on a single lease, the company is spreading its exposure across the developer, the landlord, and the lender side of the same project. It is also a direct test of a new financing machine Nvidia launched a week earlier with six of the world's largest money managers.

Data center network switches and cables

A guarantee shrinks as investor nerves grow

According to the WSJ report on August 14, Nvidia and OpenAI are nearing an agreement under which the chipmaker would provide a financial backstop only for the first phase of the Ohio project. The $250 billion figure that leaked in late July had alarmed investors, who worried about Nvidia's balance-sheet exposure if OpenAI's lease commitments ever turned sour. The revised structure keeps Nvidia on the hook for a smaller, earlier slice of the buildout while leaving the full 10 GW campus under a binding lease that OpenAI is still negotiating.

Reuters, citing the WSJ, reported the new number as "less than $120 billion." A deal could be signed as early as this weekend, according to the Journal's sources, though neither Nvidia nor OpenAI has confirmed any signing as of Monday.

OpenAI declined to comment, and Nvidia did not respond outside regular business hours, Reuters said.

The $3 billion stake in SB Energy

The Information's Saturday report fills in the second half of the strategy. Nvidia has discussed investing half of the $3 billion when the Ohio deal is signed and the other half as part of SB Energy's planned initial public offering, which the company is aiming to hold as soon as September. The IPO could raise at least $5 billion, the report said.

SB Energy, founded in 2019 and based in California, develops large-scale power and data center infrastructure. OpenAI and SoftBank each invested $1 billion in the company in January as part of the Stargate buildout, and it is now preparing to sell shares publicly. If Nvidia's investment lands, it would make the chipmaker one of the largest investors in that offering.

The logic is layered. SB Energy will build and operate the Ohio campus, which is expected to deploy a large number of Nvidia GPUs for OpenAI's workloads. A direct stake locks Nvidia into the project's upside and into the chip orders that follow, while the credit guarantee gives OpenAI the leasing firepower it needs to sign a contract of this size. Nvidia gets paid on both ends, in other words.

A pattern: Lancium before SB Energy

The SB Energy talks follow the same pattern Nvidia used with Lancium, a Texas power developer. The Information reported on August 8 that Nvidia agreed to invest $2 billion in Lancium, with the total able to grow to $3 billion. Lancium has acquired and developed about 4 GW of power resources in Texas, including 1.2 GW set aside for OpenAI's Stargate campus near Abilene.

Two equity stakes in two weeks, both in companies that build power and data centers for OpenAI. Nvidia is clearly moving past its traditional role as a component supplier and into the capital structure of AI infrastructure itself.

The $500 billion financing platform

The Ohio restructuring also lines up with Nvidia's August 10 announcement of compute financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. Those six institutions signed memorandums of understanding to create dedicated pools of capital aimed at mobilizing over $500 billion of third-party money for AI infrastructure over time.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang framed the effort as the creation of a new asset class. "We began by building chips; today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories," he said in the announcement. The platforms are meant to let customers access scarce compute without tying up Nvidia's own cash in every project.

The Ohio guarantee, in that light, is the first major test of whether that model works. Nvidia's willingness to shrink its own backstop and invest in the developer instead suggests the company wants the ecosystem's capital doing more of the heavy lifting.

Why the project still matters

The Ohio campus remains the largest data center project announced to date, regardless of how the financing shakes out. A completed 10 GW facility would roughly double the scale of anything operating today, and its power needs alone would strain regional grids. SB Energy is developing the site, OpenAI would be the anchor tenant, and the first phase is what Nvidia would back.

OpenAI's ability to fund commitments of this size remains under scrutiny, Reuters noted, because the company is unprofitable despite a valuation of $852 billion. Its model depends on external capital — from SoftBank, from Microsoft, and now from Nvidia's guarantee structure — to pay for the compute it needs to compete.

The deal-in-waiting also matters for the wider market. Data center construction is already a bottleneck for AI companies, and projects of this scale depend on financing structures that barely existed two years ago. Nvidia's hybrid approach, part guarantee, part equity, part IPO participation, gives the industry a template to copy.

What to watch this week

Three things will tell whether the Ohio deal is real. First, confirmation of the signing, which the Journal said could happen any day. Second, the formal size of the guarantee, which will show how much risk Nvidia actually keeps. Third, SB Energy's IPO filing, which should confirm whether Nvidia is in the investor lineup.

For cloud operators and edge providers in Southeast Asia, the story is a reminder that AI infrastructure financing is becoming as important as the hardware inside the buildings. Cloud & Edge Computing coverage on this site has tracked the same theme in the region, from sovereign cloud launches to edge inference deals.

The numbers will keep moving. The Wall Street Journal's original $250 billion figure lasted three weeks. The new $120 billion ceiling may not last much longer either, depending on what gets signed.