Nvidia to back OpenAI data center with upwards of $105 billion

Nvidia to back OpenAI data center with upwards of $105 billion

Daniel Howley · Technology Editor

Mon, August 17, 2026 at 10:05 PM GMT+3 2 min read

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Nvidia (NVDA), OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), and SB Energy are teaming up to build a massive 8-gigawatt data center facility in Ohio.

Nvidia will provide more than $105 billion in financing to secure land, power, and a shell for the site. Initial plans call for the facility to offer 4.25 gigawatts worth of computing capacity, with the option to increase that by another 3.75 gigawatts in the future.

SB Energy will ultimately build and own the site, known as the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, which OpenAI will then lease for 20 years. Nvidia is making a $1.5 billion investment in SB Energy as part of the arrangement.

The complex will exclusively use Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), which the company said could amount to some 1.5 million chips, or roughly $150 billion to $200 billion in potential revenue per generation deployed at the site through 2030.

Taken together, the new deal and Nvidia's prior agreements with OpenAI could total as much as $600 billion for the company.

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In a blog post on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote that the deal does not constitute circular investing. Circular investing, in which a company invests in a customer, which then purchases equipment from the investing firm, has raised concerns about inflated sales figures.

"Nvidia uses its scale and long-term visibility to secure PORTS-Pike to host Nvidia compute," Huang wrote.

"This is the same discipline we apply to supply-chain management: we secure critical inputs when we have visibility into customer demand and when doing so enables long-term productive capacity," he added.

Huang also noted that Nvidia will only pay for portions of lease and power payments, not the full cost of the site or OpenAI's obligations.

Nvidia has been on a dealmaking spree, using its vast balance sheet to invest in the likes of Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, SK Hynix (SKHY), and setting up a $500 billion fund alongside Wall Street powerhouses, including BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Apollo Global Management, to allow data center builders to finance the purchase of Nvidia chips.

(Disclosure: Yahoo is a portfolio company of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management.)

Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X at @DanielHowley.

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