Nvidia's $105bn guarantee, not OpenAI's balance sheet, is what makes Ohio's 8 gigawatts buildable

OpenAI, SoftBank's SB Energy and Nvidia have announced a 20-year data center site in Pike County, central Ohio, carrying 8 IT gigawatts of computing capacity drawn from 10 gigawatts of energy ^[1]. The number that actually explains the project is not the gigawatts: Nvidia has agreed to guarantee up to $105bn in conditional lease and power payment obligations, stepping in as the backstop if OpenAI defaults ^[2].

That is the mechanism, and it is the product news. Landowners, power developers and lenders signing 20-year paper against this campus are not underwriting OpenAI's future revenue; they are underwriting a guarantee from the chip supplier. In exchange Nvidia takes exclusive rights to supply the chips and a $1.5bn direct equity investment in SB Energy ^[2], and the site runs exclusively on Nvidia hardware ^[3].

The unit economics of the backstop are worth holding onto. Spread across 8 IT gigawatts, $105bn is roughly $13bn of guaranteed obligation per IT gigawatt ^[4]; spread across the 20-year term, roughly $5.3bn a year ^[5]. Those are ceilings on a conditional exposure, not a bill, but they are the scale at which compute is now being underwritten.

The build is phased. The campus launches with 4.25 gigawatts and an option to expand by 3.75 gigawatts ^[6], which is how you get to the advertised 8 ^[7]. OpenAI expects initial computing capacity to come online starting in 2028 as the first phase ^[8]. On the power side, 10 gigawatts serving 8 IT gigawatts implies 1.25 gigawatts delivered per gigawatt of compute ^[9], supported by a $4bn-plus local energy infrastructure investment from SoftBank and SB Energy ^[3]. OpenAI and SB Energy have pledged that local residents will not bear any energy or infrastructure costs ^[10]. OpenAI puts the labour figures at 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 permanent positions ^[11].

Critics immediately called the structure circular, on the grounds that supplier, buyer and investor are propping up each other's balance sheets ^[12]. Nvidia's Jensen Huang rejected that directly: "Is this circular financing? No", stressing that OpenAI remains directly on the hook for rent payments ^[13]. His stated rationale is that Nvidia is buying long-lived physical sites it can refill with each chip generation, describing the deal as securing long-lived infrastructure so OpenAI can deploy AI factories that are upgraded repeatedly ^[14]. Read plainly, the guarantee buys Nvidia a two-decade socket at a site it does not have to re-permit.

Context on siting: the campus sits partly on federal land once used for uranium enrichment ^[15], part of a broader federal effort to convert Cold War nuclear sites into natural gas-backed AI hubs ^[16]. In July, NextEra Energy and Brookfield disclosed preliminary plans with the Department of Energy for Kentucky's decommissioned Paducah enrichment complex ^[17]. For scale, the Ohio site follows last year's $500bn Stargate announcement led by OpenAI, Nvidia, SoftBank and Oracle, which targets 10 gigawatts across multiple sites ^[18], and exceeds Meta's planned 5-gigawatt Louisiana facility by 3 gigawatts on its own ^[19], as well as SpaceX's 1-gigawatt Colossus network in Tennessee and Mississippi ^[20].

Three things to watch. First, how the conditions on the $105bn are drawn, since "conditional" is doing all the work in that sentence ^[2]. Second, whether buyers negotiating 2028 capacity elsewhere now treat a supplier guarantee as standard terms rather than an Nvidia-specific favour. Third, whether the 3.75-gigawatt option is exercised ^[6], which is the cleanest signal of whether the first 4.25 gigawatts found paying demand.