NVIDIA announced it will guarantee up to $105 billion in lease payments and invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary developing the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, in partnership with OpenAI. The commitment is a watershed moment in AI infrastructure financing: NVIDIA is underwriting the bulk of the financial risk for what is expected to become one of the world's largest AI compute hubs, with initial capacity of 4.25 gigawatts and potential expansion to 8 gigawatts total.
SB Energy will build, own, and operate the facility under a 20-year lease to OpenAI, which will be the exclusive tenant. NVIDIA will be the site's exclusive AI compute provider, deploying its full-stack DSX platform (GPUs, CPUs, and networking). The $105 billion guarantee is carefully structured: it covers only residual value commitments after OpenAI meets lease obligations, and payments are triggered only if OpenAI defaults or becomes insolvent and SB Energy cannot find a replacement tenant or sell the campus at fair value. This caps NVIDIA's downside to asset-value risk, not full lease obligations.
The PORTS-Pike campus is being reindustrialized at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (a Cold War-era uranium enrichment site). SB Energy and SoftBank will invest at least $4.2 billion in regional grid infrastructure in partnership with AEP Ohio. Capacity is expected to come online in phases starting in 2028. The broader project is estimated to create 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent positions, with OpenAI adding $40 million to an $80 million total community benefits fund.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang framed the deal not as 'circular financing' but as a logical extension of supply-chain discipline: securing long-lived infrastructure where NVIDIA compute can be upgraded across multiple generations. Each generation deployed could represent approximately 1.5 million NVIDIA GPUs, or $150–200 billion in NVIDIA revenue. Huang argues the residual value of older-generation NVIDIA chips provides natural collateral for the guarantee; in theory, he says, the company would only agree to the backstop if downside risk is minimal.
For practitioners: This deal signals that NVIDIA is moving upstream into infrastructure finance and real-estate partnering, no longer merely a chip supplier. The guarantee locks in a massive and long-lived revenue stream (OpenAI's committed deployments represent ~12 gigawatts through 2030, potentially expandable to 16 gigawatts, or roughly $600 billion in NVIDIA compute revenue). It also raises questions about financial exposure: if AI capex cycles tighten or customer economics deteriorate, NVIDIA's balance sheet could be called upon. Architects should monitor how this reshapes NVIDIA's role in the ecosystem—from vendor to infrastructure co-investor.