Industry AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-18

The number is official now: Nvidia has put $105 billion behind the rent on a single OpenAI data centre

In a securities filing on 17 August, Nvidia disclosed it will guarantee up to $105 billion of conditional lease and power payments for the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio — a site being built by SoftBank's SB Energy and leased to OpenAI for 20 years. The guarantee covers an initial 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with an option for a further 3.75 gigawatts, taking the campus to 8 gigawatts of computing drawn from around 10 gigawatts of new generation, including a 9.2-gigawatt gas plant on the site. Nvidia is separately buying $1.5 billion of equity in SB Energy. Capacity is expected to come online in phases from 2028. Three weeks ago the talks were reported at up to $250 billion; this filing covers the first phase only.

Why it mattersThis is the clearest documented case yet of a chip supplier underwriting the rent of the customer who buys its chips — Nvidia is not lending OpenAI money, it is promising the landlord that the payments arrive even if OpenAI cannot make them. It also shows where the real constraint sits: the deal is measured in gigawatts, and it needed a purpose-built gas plant on former federal uranium-enrichment land to happen at all. If the compute is only useful from 2028, the bill for guaranteeing it starts long before the revenue does.

✓ Verified · 4 sources

The number is official now: Nvidia has put $105 billion behind the rent on a single OpenAI data centre

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