OpenAI's Ohio lease puts Nvidia on the hook for up to $105 billion

OpenAI signed a 20-year lease for an Ohio data center campus built to run 8 gigawatts of its own compute, and Nvidia is standing behind the deal with a guarantee that could reach $105 billion if the whole arrangement falls apart. The campus, called PORTS-Pike, is being built and owned by SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, on the strength of a financing structure that leans almost entirely on Nvidia's balance sheet rather than OpenAI's own credit.

The scale involved is unusual even by this year's standards. PORTS-Pike is planned for 10 gigawatts of total capacity once cooling and supporting infrastructure are counted, with 8 gigawatts of that reserved for OpenAI's own IT load. The first construction phase covers 4.25 gigawatts, and the first 800 megawatts of it are due online in 2028. Combined with OpenAI's other announced sites, the company's compute commitments now run to roughly 12 gigawatts through 2030 — a number that keeps climbing every few months as new leases get signed across Texas, the Midwest, and now Ohio.

Nvidia's role here goes beyond simply supplying chips. The company is putting $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy and taking exclusive rights to supply chips for the first half of the site, but the headline number is the $105 billion guarantee: if OpenAI ever walks away from the lease, SB Energy first has to try to find a replacement tenant, then attempt to sell the facilities outright, and only after both of those fail does Nvidia step in to cover the difference in value, capped at that figure. It's a backstop against the worst case, not a blank check, but it still ties Nvidia's own balance sheet to whether OpenAI's compute demand keeps growing the way everyone involved is betting it will. Nvidia's internal math reportedly assumes roughly 1.5 million GPUs per hardware generation across the site, worth $150 to $200 billion in revenue on its own — and if OpenAI later exercises its option on the remaining 3.75 gigawatts, people close to the deal put the full package's value near $600 billion.

The site itself has an unusual backstory: part of the campus sits on a former US Department of Energy uranium enrichment facility, and power comes from a 9.2-gigawatt gas plant that the US government owns and Japan is financing as part of a broader trade agreement — old federal nuclear infrastructure being repurposed to keep GPUs running is its own small sign of how fast this buildout is moving. It also isn't happening in isolation: Nvidia's Jensen Huang has taken to describing land, power, and shell — "LPS" — as the industry's real bottleneck now, not chip supply itself, and OpenAI's own letter to Texas earlier this month made a similar case for treating power access as the constraint that decides where AI infrastructure actually gets built. Deals like this one are also why roughly nine major tech companies are now estimated to be carrying close to $3 trillion in AI-related commitments that don't show up as debt on a balance sheet, with total lease commitments across the industry having roughly quadrupled over the past year. Crypto-mining operators watched this dynamic up close well before OpenAI did: Core Scientific's own pivot from bitcoin mining to AI hosting ran on the same logic — that the power connection and the site itself are worth more than the hardware sitting on top of them, and whoever controls that first gets to name their price to whoever needs the compute.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.