Nvidia will guarantee up to $105 billion in financing for a new OpenAI data center in Ohio, according to a securities filing made public Monday.
That is a lot of money for one facility. It is also less than what was being discussed a few weeks ago.
From $250 Billion to $105 Billion
CNBC reported in late July that Nvidia was in talks to backstop as much as $250 billion so OpenAI could raise debt for a 10-gigawatt data center at the Ohio site. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported Nvidia was preparing to cut that guarantee to under $120 billion. Monday's filing landed just below that, at $105 billion.
The credit supports an initial 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with an option for another 3.75 gigawatts. Nvidia will supply the compute, with capacity coming online in phases starting in 2028.
SB Energy will build and manage the facility, called the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, and lease it to OpenAI for 20 years. SB Energy and SoftBank plan to build power infrastructure supporting 10 gigawatts of energy and put at least $4.2 billion into regional grid upgrades. Nvidia is separately investing $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy.
A Tightly Connected Group of Investors
OpenAI already holds a stake in SB Energy. Sam Altman was an early investor in the company before he became OpenAI's CEO. Now Nvidia is financing the data center that SB Energy will build for OpenAI, using Nvidia chips, on a site partly owned by a company OpenAI and its CEO already had money in.
That kind of overlap is exactly what has fueled worries about circular financing in AI. Nvidia invests in or lends to companies that then spend heavily on Nvidia hardware, and some of Wall Street's more skeptical voices have compared the pattern to the vendor financing that inflated the dot-com bubble.
Nvidia has been busy elsewhere too. Last week it partnered with six large asset managers to build financing platforms aimed at deploying $500 billion in third-party capital for data center projects, on top of the Ohio deal.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC's "Squawk Box" that the buildout reflects where the industry's bottleneck now sits.
"Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age," he said.
OpenAI says the Ohio project will support 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent positions once running.
What This Means for Miami
None of this money is headed to South Florida, but the scale gap is worth sitting with. Ohio's project could eventually reach 8 gigawatts of capacity. Metrobloks' MIA-A1 facility near Sweetwater, one of Miami-Dade's larger AI data center projects, is planned around 16 to 22 megawatts, roughly a thousandth the size.
That is by design. Miami isn't trying to build the next training mega-campus; local projects are positioning themselves around AI inference, serving nearby businesses with low-latency compute rather than training frontier models. But Miami's investor and fintech community is watching the same financing questions play out at a smaller scale locally: how much of the AI infrastructure boom is funded by genuine outside capital, and how much is companies effectively funding their own customers.
The Ohio deal is a preview of what that scrutiny looks like when the numbers get large enough for regulators, and Wall Street, to start asking harder questions.