Nvidia (NVDA.US) once again “transfusion” OpenAI plans to provide up to 105 billion US dollars to support the construction of large-scale AI data centers

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Nvidia (NVDA.US) is further deepening cooperation with OpenAI in the field of artificial intelligence infrastructure. According to the latest financial documents, Nvidia has agreed to provide up to US$105 billion in financial support for a very large data center campus in Ohio, USA. Once completed, the park will be leased by OpenAI and Nvidia AI chips will be deployed on a large scale.

OpenAI said on Monday that the company has signed an agreement to obtain up to about 8 gigawatts (GW) of computing power from its data center campus in Pike County, Ohio. The first batch of 800 megawatts (MW) is expected to be put into operation by 2028. As a comparison, 1 gigawatt of electricity is sufficient to meet the electricity needs of up to 750,000 American households at a specific point in time, which also highlights the project's huge scale of energy and computing power.

According to the agreement, OpenAI does not need to immediately bear the full cost of the lease, but will only start paying once the corresponding computing capacity has been built and can be leased. Nvidia, on the other hand, said it will support “specific parts of the lease and electricity payments” of the project. Since the data center is expected to deploy a large number of Nvidia AI chips in the future, this arrangement will also further expand the application of Nvidia hardware in OpenAI computing power infrastructure.

In addition to relevant support of up to $105 billion, Nvidia also agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy Corp. SB Energy received support from SoftBank Group and will be responsible for the construction, ownership and operation of the data center park.

According to the current plan, the Ohio project is expected to become one of the world's largest data center parks after completion. It is also the latest reflection of the current rapid expansion in AI computing power demand. The project is also one of the large-scale investment projects promoted by SoftBank founder Sun Zhengyi, and has received support from the Trump administration. The latter sees the relevant investment as an important result of the expansion of AI infrastructure construction in the US.

Notably, the amount of support of up to 105 billion US dollars this time is huge, but it is still lower than the potential plan previously discussed in the market. Earlier, it was reported that Nvidia had discussed providing guarantees of up to $250 billion for OpenAI's data center leases.

In recent years, Nvidia has continuously supported AI companies to expand infrastructure construction through investment and guarantees. The company previously provided financial support to AI cloud computing service provider CoreWeave (CRWV.US) and directly invested in OpenAI and Anthropic. This arrangement with OpenAI is Nvidia's largest such support agreement to date.

However, as the scale of AI infrastructure investment continues to expand, the market is also beginning to pay attention to off-balance sheet debt formed by related companies through special arrangements, as well as potential “circular financing” issues, where Nvidia provides financial support to AI companies, and the latter then uses these funds to buy Nvidia chips, thus forming a cycle between capital and revenue.

In response, Nvidia made it clear that the Ohio project was not a revolving fund. The company emphasized that the final data center lease costs will be borne by OpenAI, saying “OpenAI will pay the rent.”

This collaboration further shows that after AI computing power construction has reached the tens of billion dollars or even 100 billion US dollars level, Nvidia's role is expanding from a simple AI chip supplier to an infrastructure financing supporter. By providing financial support for large-scale data center projects, Nvidia can not only help core customers such as OpenAI solve the financing problems required to build huge computing power, but is also expected to further drive the growth in demand for its own AI chips.

As of press release, Nvidia's stock price was up 0.7% to $226.725.