NVIDIA has agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in lease obligations at a planned 8-gigawatt AI data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, in a deal that makes the chipmaker the financial backstop for one of the largest single compute buildouts yet disclosed. The commitment, detailed in a current report filed with the SEC on August 17, 2026, anchors a partnership with SoftBank-owned developer SB Energy at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus (the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant), with OpenAI signed on as the tenant under a 20-year lease.
Under the structure laid out in the filing, NVIDIA entered into residual value guaranties with SB Energy covering leases for approximately 4.25 gigawatts of IT load in aggregate, and can extend credit support to roughly 3.8 additional gigawatts at its sole discretion. NVIDIA’s cumulative payment obligation is capped at $105 billion for the initial commitment, and payments kick in only if OpenAI defaults on a lease or becomes insolvent, in which case NVIDIA would cover the shortfall between a guaranteed minimum lease value and whatever SB Energy recovers through a replacement lease or sale. The obligations fall away if OpenAI achieves a satisfactory credit rating, if it terminates a lease under its terms, or at the 20th anniversary of each lease’s commencement. OpenAI has agreed to reimburse and indemnify NVIDIA for any amounts actually paid out.
SB Energy will build, own, and operate the campus, with capacity expected to come online in phases beginning in 2028. OpenAI will deploy NVIDIA’s full-stack DSX AI factory platform (GPUs, CPUs, and networking) across the initial 4.25 gigawatts, and NVIDIA will be the site’s exclusive AI compute infrastructure provider. Alongside the guaranties, NVIDIA is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy, joining existing investors SoftBank Group and OpenAI, according to the press release attached to the filing.
“AI is becoming infrastructure — the foundation for intelligence in every industry — and land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, in the release. “We are securing long-lived infrastructure for NVIDIA compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories that can be upgraded repeatedly with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics.”
What the Guarantee Actually Commits
The mechanism is a residual value guaranty, not a loan and not a lease of NVIDIA’s own. NVIDIA does not pay rent; it stands behind the value of the leases themselves. Each guaranty becomes effective when the corresponding lease commences, and NVIDIA’s payment obligations are conditioned on SB Energy first meeting ready-for-service requirements for the relevant premises, expected beginning in 2028.
If a trigger event occurs, NVIDIA holds the choice of remedy: it can assume the lease itself, require SB Energy to relet the premises, initiate a sale, allow termination, or defer for up to a year while covering specified project costs. The full form of the agreements will be filed as an exhibit to NVIDIA’s quarterly report for the fiscal quarter ended July 26, 2026.
The $1.5 billion equity check is separate from, and smaller than, what was on the table days ago. Reuters reported on August 15, 2026 that NVIDIA had been weighing an investment of as much as $3 billion in SB Energy and roughly $100 billion in credit support, after earlier discussions of a guarantee as large as $250 billion were scaled back. The filed structure lands near the revised credit figure at a $105 billion cap, with the equity portion settled at half the reported maximum.
A Nuclear Site Repowered for Compute
The campus is a reindustrialization of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment site, spanning private and federal land leased from the Department of Energy. In a March 2026 fact sheet, the DOE said SoftBank Group and SB Energy plan to build 10 gigawatts of new power generation, including at least 9.2 gigawatts of natural gas, to feed 10 gigawatts of data center development, and that SB Energy committed to paying for accelerated cleanup at the site.
The power economics are structured to keep costs off local bills. SB Energy and AEP Ohio are investing $4.2 billion in new transmission infrastructure (including 765-kilovolt lines and four substations) funded by the project rather than ratepayers, under a dedicated data center rate structure. The DOE projected more than 10,000 construction jobs over four years and more than 2,000 operational roles. OpenAI has also added $40 million to SB Energy’s previously announced $40 million community benefits fund, targeting affordable energy, workforce development, and local economic programs.
Where This Fits in OpenAI’s Buildout
The Ohio campus is the latest and most heavily backstopped piece of an infrastructure acquisition run that has kept OpenAI at the center of the compute market. The company signed a seven-year, $38 billion cloud partnership with AWS in November 2025, and earlier in 2026 it scrapped a planned Stargate expansion in Texas with Oracle even as it pursued new capacity elsewhere. It has also been widening its commercial base to pay for it. The company told investors in August 2026 that enterprise revenue has overtaken its ChatGPT consumer business.
For NVIDIA, the deal inverts its usual position. Rather than selling GPUs into someone else’s balance sheet, it is now guaranteeing the shell, power, and land those GPUs will occupy — with the exclusivity clause ensuring the 8 gigawatts get filled with its own DSX platform. The first concrete test arrives with the quarterly report covering the period ended July 26, 2026, which will carry the full text of the guaranty agreements, followed by the first ready-for-service milestones expected in 2028.
