Nvidia disclosed in a securities filing on Monday that it’ll guarantee up to $105 billion in lease and power obligations tied to an 8-gigawatt OpenAI data center rising in Pike County, Ohio, an arrangement the chipmaker described in the filing as covering “defined portions of lease and power payments” over OpenAI’s 20-year tenancy. The disclosure ends weeks of speculation about the size of the backstop and reintroduces a question the industry has spent 2026 trying not to answer directly: at what point does a supplier financing its largest customer’s real estate become the story itself.

The campus, developed by SoftBank-backed SB Energy, will bring 4.25 gigawatts online initially, with an option for another 3.75. The first 800 megawatts are expected in 2028. Bloomberg reckons the full site could draw enough electricity to power up to six million homes. SoftBank and SB Energy have committed to building at least 10 gigawatts of new generation to serve it, alongside a $4.2 billion grid investment with AEP Ohio. Nvidia is also putting $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy, whose exclusive customer will be a facility running Nvidia processors.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, got ahead of the framing on X. “Is this circular financing? No. OpenAI will pay the lease.” He told analysts the Pike County site alone could contribute $200 billion to Nvidia’s revenue, part of a broader arc in which he projects $600 billion in OpenAI sales by 2030 across 16 gigawatts of deployed capacity. Huang said Nvidia was drawing on the project’s “its scale and long-term visibility” to make the guarantee viable.

The numbers have moved. CNBC previously reported Nvidia was in discussions to backstop up to $250 billion in OpenAI debt; the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the figure had been trimmed to less than $120 billion before landing at Monday’s $105 billion.

Not everyone finds Huang’s disavowal persuasive. “Investors are right to be worried about what seems to be a never-ending loop of A.I. deals,” Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell, told Reuters, adding that “the field of players isn’t all that vast.”

That’s the structural read. A handful of hyperscalers, one dominant chip vendor, one Gulf-adjacent capital provider, and one utility are underwriting each other’s forward curves. OpenAI says the project supports 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 long-term positions. Whether those numbers or Huang’s justify a supplier guaranteeing two decades of its customer’s rent is the question the filing puts on the table without answering.

Sources