What changed
Nvidia's August filing shows a promise that chip companies almost never make. Nvidia agreed to guarantee the rent on a giant data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, going up on the grounds of the decommissioned Portsmouth uranium plant. OpenAI is the tenant on a twenty-year lease, and SB Energy, a SoftBank company, builds and owns the buildings. If OpenAI stops paying, Nvidia covers the gap between the rent it promised the landlord and whatever the landlord can recover by re-letting or selling the space. From 2028, when the first buildings are expected to open, that promise could cost Nvidia up to $105 billion.
The most Nvidia can be asked to pay if OpenAI stops paying rent. Nvidia covers the shortfall, not the whole lease.
- August 2026Nvidia files
Guarantee on 4.25 IT-GW of Ohio lease disclosed.
- 2028First buildings open
Guarantee takes effect as space is ready for service.
- 20 yearsOr until the rating
Obligation ends early if OpenAI earns a satisfactory credit rating.
Why it matters
That promise is easier to understand once you see who is standing where. Almost everyone in this deal sits on more than one side of it. SoftBank and OpenAI already owned pieces of SB Energy, the landlord. Nvidia is now investing $1.5 billion in that same landlord this year, which means it owns part of the company collecting rent from OpenAI. OpenAI agreed to run the campus on Nvidia's own systems, with limited exceptions, which makes Nvidia the exclusive compute provider on the site. OpenAI also promised to pay Nvidia back for anything Nvidia actually pays out. The clause that explains the arrangement is the one that ends it: Nvidia's obligation stops once OpenAI achieves a satisfactory credit rating. Taken together, that suggests the guarantee exists because OpenAI cannot yet borrow cheaply against its own name, so Nvidia is lending its own good credit until OpenAI has some. For Ohio, the stakes are physical. SB Energy and SoftBank plan to build at least ten gigawatts of new power generation for the campus, on ground the federal government once used to enrich uranium. SB Energy says the grid partnership behind it is designed to protect ratepayers, and that claim is the one Ohio households will feel first.
What to watch
The paperwork that governs all of it is not public yet. Nvidia says the forms will be filed with its next quarterly report. That is the document to read, because it should show what counts as a default and how fast Nvidia has to pay. If OpenAI's revenue grows into its lease commitments, the promise could expire quietly, without Nvidia ever writing a check. If it does not, Nvidia owns a problem in Pike County that has nothing to do with chips. Its choices would be to take over the lease, push the landlord to find a new tenant, force a sale, or wait up to a year while covering the project costs. Whether OpenAI reaches a credit rating strong enough to release Nvidia is not yet known, and that one question decides whether this was cheap financing or an expensive favor.
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