Nexalytics Tech
Nvidia is no longer just selling the picks and shovels of the AI gold rush — it's now co-signing the leases. Reuters reports that the chipmaker has agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion of lease and power obligations tied to a colossal data-center campus in Pike County, Ohio, that OpenAI plans to rent from SB Energy, the renewables developer owned by SoftBank. Alongside the guarantee, Nvidia is expected to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy itself. The site is planned as an up-to-8-gigawatt campus — among the largest single AI installations ever announced — with an initial 4.25 gigawatts of capacity under a 20-year OpenAI lease and the first 800 megawatts scheduled to come online in 2028. Nvidia would be the exclusive chip supplier for the facility.
How the Guarantee Actually Works
The $105 billion figure is a ceiling, not a cheque. According to Reuters' reporting, Nvidia's commitment covers a portion of the project's lease and power payments plus a minimum-residual-value promise: OpenAI pays its rent as normal, but if it were to default and the owner had to re-lease or sell the campus, Nvidia would cover the gap between a contractual floor and whatever the facility actually fetched. The financing structure — how much is equity versus debt — has not been finalized, and the guarantee is not the project's full construction cost. SB Energy and SoftBank separately plan at least 10 gigawatts of new power generation and $4.2 billion of grid investment with utility AEP Ohio, while OpenAI and SoftBank have committed $80 million to local community projects. OpenAI says construction could support roughly 35,000 jobs through 2032, with about 2,500 permanent operating roles.
The Earnings That Pay for It
The deal surfaced days before Nvidia posted numbers that explain how it can contemplate a nine-figure backstop — wait, nine-zero. For the second quarter of fiscal 2027, ended July 26, the company reported revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year earlier and 18% sequentially, with the data-center division alone contributing $89 billion. Net income came in at $59.7 billion on a GAAP basis, and Nvidia guided the current quarter to roughly $108 billion in revenue — a forecast that explicitly assumes zero data-center compute sales to China. It also returned about $26 billion to shareholders during the quarter and still has nearly $99 billion left under its buyback authorization. CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back on the "circular financing" critique — the idea that Nvidia funds the customers who buy its chips — arguing the investments seed durable demand; analysts note the real test is whether those bets generate satisfactory returns rather than simply pulling sales forward. Huang has suggested the initial Ohio site alone could eventually represent as much as $200 billion in Nvidia revenue, with a broader Reuters-reported estimate of $600 billion by 2030 if OpenAI's buildout reaches 16 gigawatts of Nvidia-powered compute.
The Price-Hike Question
There is one cloud on the horizon for buyers. The Information reported on August 22 that server makers have begun warning customers of price increases of roughly 17% on some Grace Blackwell 300 and Vera Rubin 200 systems slated for delivery next year, with Bloomberg separately reporting hikes above 15% in many cases. Soaring memory costs are cited as the driver, and the final increase reportedly depends on chip generation and memory configuration. Nvidia has not publicly confirmed the figures, so treat them as supply-chain reporting rather than an announced list-price change — but if they hold, the cost of the AI buildout is about to rise just as its biggest financier doubles down.
💡 The Nexalytics Take
This is the moment the AI buildout became a balance-sheet business. Nvidia isn't merely supplying chips for OpenAI's Ohio campus — it's underwriting the real estate and the power bill, taking on customer-credit and residual-value risk that used to belong to banks and utilities. The strategy locks in an exclusive silicon pipeline worth potentially hundreds of billions, and with $96 billion in quarterly revenue and margins near 75%, Nvidia can afford the exposure. But guarantees like this fuse the fates of the AI industry's biggest supplier and its biggest customer: if demand for compute keeps compounding, the Ohio deal looks visionary; if it stalls, Nvidia owns the downside of the most expensive bet in tech history. Watch the final financing structure, and whether the reported double-digit price hikes cool any of that demand.
Sources: Reuters — Nvidia to invest $1.5B in SB Energy under OpenAI data center deal (Aug 17, 2026) · NVIDIA — Q2 FY2027 financial results (Aug 26, 2026) · The Information — Nvidia AI chip prices to rise about 17% (Aug 22, 2026) · Reuters/Bloomberg — price-hike reports (Aug 22, 2026)
Reporting only; not investment advice.
