Nvidia's $120bn Ohio backstop puts the chip vendor on the hook for OpenAI's rent

Nvidia has confirmed that it is financially backing SoftBank's data center at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio, a project led by SB Energy and set to be fully leased to OpenAI ^[1][5]. The structure is the story: the company selling the chips is now guaranteeing the lease and power payments that make the buildout financeable, which locates the binding constraint in credit rather than in silicon ^[7][13].

The site could eventually reach 10GW, and Nvidia is supporting the first 4.25GW ^[2]. Jensen Huang confirmed the arrangement in a LinkedIn post, framing it as a partnership with SB Energy to secure land, power and shell capacity, known as LPS, at the Department of Energy site ^[3]. According to Datacenterdynamics, Nvidia is reportedly considering a $120bn backstop to lower debt costs on the project, having initially planned to support as much as $250bn before investor pushback over the size of the risk ^[17]. That is a reduction of roughly 52 percent ^[20]. Its equity cheque to SB Energy was cut on a similar curve, to $1.5bn from a reported $3bn, a 50 percent haircut ^[4][12].

Huang was careful about what the guarantee covers. Nvidia's support runs to "defined portions of lease and power payments, along with a specified residual-value commitment," not the full cost of the site or all of the tenant's obligations, he said ^[18]. It becomes effective in phases as buildings are placed in service between 2028 and 2030, and Nvidia's exposure declines as OpenAI pays rent and capacity comes online ^[19]. The term is 20 years, and Nvidia compute will be deployed exclusively on the site ^[7].

The rationale is stated plainly enough. Most customers secure LPS themselves and then buy Nvidia gear, Huang said, but leading AI labs are "growing faster than their balance sheets and long-term credit profiles can support" ^[13]. Read as a credit document rather than a press release, that is an admission that OpenAI cannot sign a two-decade power-and-shell lease at this scale on its own name.

The offsetting arithmetic is on Nvidia's side of the ledger. Each generation of systems at Ports-Pike could represent about 1.5 million GPUs, or roughly $150bn to $200bn in Nvidia revenue, Huang said, with multiple generations expected over 20 years ^[9]. The site will carry the full DSX stack, including CPUs, networking and infrastructure software ^[8]. A $120bn contingent guarantee is therefore smaller than the revenue from a single hardware generation on the same concrete ^[15]. Huang rejected the circular-financing charge, saying Nvidia is applying "the same discipline we apply to supply-chain management" by securing critical inputs where it has demand visibility ^[21].

Underneath sits a large energy project. SB Energy, which is preparing for an IPO, plans 10GW of new generation, 9.2GW of it natural gas, supporting up to 8GW of IT load ^[6]. That gas share is 92 percent of the new capacity ^[14]. SB Energy and SoftBank also plan at least $4.2bn in regional grid infrastructure with AEP Ohio, which they say is designed to protect ratepayers ^[10].

Watch whether Nvidia takes the remaining 3.75GW, which it may yet decide to secure ^[11]. Note that 4.25GW plus 3.75GW equals the 8GW of IT load, not the 10GW of generation, so the headline capacity and the leasable capacity are different numbers ^[16]. Also watch the 2028 first-service date, since that is when the guarantee starts to bite ^[19], and the AEP Ohio ratepayer terms, which are a claim rather than a settled tariff ^[10].