Nvidia is backstopping $105B of OpenAI's Ohio megacampus

Those two "separate" OpenAI infrastructure headlines are one deal. Nvidia put $1.5B directly into SB Energy, the developer of the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio — and, per an SEC filing, agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power obligations over the 20-year term. OpenAI leases the site; Nvidia is the exclusive compute provider and the credit behind the rent.

The scale: 8 IT-gigawatts of compute drawing on roughly 10 GW of generation, with ~9.2 GW of new gas-fired power envisioned. It opens at 4.25 GW with an option to add 3.75 GW, and first capacity isn't expected online until 2028. OpenAI is promising 35,000 construction jobs, 2,500 permanent ones, $164M for Ohio programs, and that local ratepayers won't eat the energy or infrastructure costs.

What's actually new here isn't the gigawatts — it's the financing shape. Nvidia is no longer just selling GPUs into this buildout; it's underwriting the counterparty risk so a developer can raise against a lease OpenAI's own balance sheet couldn't yet carry. That's vendor financing at sovereign scale, and it circles back: the guarantee enables the campus, the campus buys Nvidia chips.

Why it matters: when the chip supplier guarantees the customer's rent, GPU demand and GPU financing stop being independent signals.