Nvidia's newest product is credit: $3bn into SB Energy, $250bn behind OpenAI's rent

Nvidia is reportedly negotiating two commitments at once with SB Energy, SoftBank's power and infrastructure subsidiary: an equity investment of about $3 billion, and a guarantee of roughly $250 billion in financing that would allow OpenAI to lease SB Energy's planned 10-gigawatt data center at Piketon in southern Ohio ^[1][2]. The guarantee, reported by the Wall Street Journal on July 26, is the part that changes what Nvidia is: not a vendor selling into a buildout, but a credit counterparty standing behind the rent ^[2][6].

The mechanism is straightforward and unflattering to everyone involved. OpenAI does not hold an investment-grade credit rating, so SB Energy would pay more to borrow against a lease signed by that tenant; Nvidia's balance sheet is being asked to close the spread ^[6]. The site sits on land controlled by the US Department of Energy under a public-private partnership, with phase one targeting roughly 800 MW of generation capacity by 2028 ^[3][4]. Total Stargate costs could exceed $500 billion once chips and related infrastructure are counted ^[5], and some of the same discussions reportedly cover financing for the accelerators themselves, a component estimated at around $350 billion ^[10]. On those figures the silicon is roughly 70 percent of the programme ^[13], which is another way of saying Nvidia would be guaranteeing the loan that buys Nvidia.

Scale matters here. The reported guarantee is on the order of 83 times the reported equity cheque ^[11], so the equity is close to irrelevant as an economic position and mostly reads as alignment. The $3 billion would itself be about three times the $1 billion that OpenAI and SoftBank put into SB Energy in January 2026, $500 million each ^[7][12]. Nvidia's earlier commitment was the more conventional kind: a 2025 letter of intent to deploy at least 10 GW of its systems, with the first gigawatt targeted for the second half of 2026 ^[8]. A letter of intent expires quietly. A financing guarantee does not.

The publisher's framing is that Nvidia is moving down the value chain because unbuilt data centers do not buy chips, and that at Stargate's scale even minor financing friction can delay orders worth tens of billions ^[14]. That is the bull case for writing the guarantee. The cost is that the contingent liability sits on Nvidia if OpenAI's trajectory disappoints or AI demand cools ^[14], and it sits there in the same downturn that would already be compressing Nvidia's order book. Vendor credit support concentrates two exposures that a supplier normally gets to hold separately.

Watch four things. Whether the deal closes at all: the talks were described as fluid as of late July, with a real possibility of collapse ^[9]. Whether the chip-financing tranche of roughly $350 billion ends up attached to the same credit support or is separated out ^[10]. How Nvidia characterises any executed guarantee in its filings, since the disclosure language will define whether investors are being asked to treat $250 billion as remote or probable ^[2]. And the 800 MW phase-one target for 2028, which is the first date on which the physical buildout either validates the paper or does not ^[4].