OpenAI has signed a 10-gigawatt data-center lease in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy, a deal partly backed by Nvidia and described as the largest data-center project announced to date. The agreement caps weeks of negotiations over the project.
Nvidia's financial backstop
According to WSJ, the deal is backed by a commitment from Nvidia intended to help the developer raise debt financing without exposing the chipmaker to substantial risk. Nvidia has agreed to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center, starting with the first phase, which represents around 5 gigawatts of power. In exchange, Nvidia will be the exclusive chip provider for the first half of the Ohio site and will take an equity stake in SB Energy, with the option to expand its commitment to the full campus later.
OpenAI's 20-year lease is the latest in a series of complex transactions aimed at helping AI firms secure large amounts of computing capacity, with chip companies including Nvidia and Google increasingly using their balance sheets to help startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic sign leases they can raise debt against.
Site details and government involvement
The southern Ohio campus is partly located on a former uranium-enrichment site owned by the US Department of Energy and is expected to generate enough energy to power seven million homes. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright have been closely involved in the project.
Nvidia's support is meant to make the project cheaper to finance by reassuring lenders that the data centers would hold their value even if OpenAI stopped being the tenant, with a structure requiring several mitigation steps, including SB Energy first trying to re-lease or sell the site, before Nvidia would owe any payments, up to $105 billion for the initial phase.
Commercial stakes for Nvidia
Nvidia is expected to sell hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of chips into the project's first phase and has discussed financing OpenAI's chip purchases for the campus. As part of the arrangement, Nvidia said it would make a $1.5 billion equity investment in SB Energy, which is majority-owned by Japan's SoftBank and counts OpenAI as an investor; SB Energy is reportedly working with bankers on a possible IPO as soon as next month, aiming to raise between $5 billion and $7 billion.
Nvidia had initially planned to guarantee OpenAI's full 10-gigawatt commitment, a package that could have totaled around $250 billion, before the scale of the backstop was reworked in recent days to address investor concerns.
The campus will depend on a 9.2-gigawatt natural-gas plant owned by the US government and financed by Japan under a recent trade deal.
