Nvidia to Back Ohio Data Center With as Much as $105 Billion

Nvidia said on Monday that it had agreed to spend as much as $105 billion to back one of the world’s largest data centers, which is being built in Ohio and will be leased to OpenAI.

The sum is one of the largest from Nvidia toward supporting A.I. labs that are seeking more computing power. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said in a blog post that the company would use the money to guarantee “lease and power payments” at the site. He added that A.I. labs “are growing faster than their balance sheets and long-term credit profiles can support.”

Nvidia’s financing for the Ohio data center, a project that could cost as much as $500 billion, is part of the complex dealmaking behind the A.I. boom. Using unusual arrangements with chipmakers, cloud computing providers and governments, start-ups like OpenAI and Anthropic are gaining access to computing power that they could not afford by themselves.

Many of these deals are circular, with an A.I. start-up receiving billions of dollars from technology giants before spending those billions on the same companies to pay for chips, cloud computing and other services. Nvidia previously invested $30 billion in OpenAI, and the data center in Ohio will use only Nvidia’s chips.

Mr. Huang said in the blog post that Nvidia’s financing for the Ohio data center was not circular because “OpenAI will pay the lease.”

In turn, OpenAI said in a blog post that it would lease the Ohio site “only as completed capacity becomes available,” meaning it may not pay anything until the data center starts coming online in 2028. OpenAI agreed to a 20-year lease for the site, which will provide it eight gigawatts of computing capacity, or enough electricity to power about six million households in the United States.

Nvidia’s financing will support 4.25 of those gigawatts, though the company could extend its arrangement to the remaining gigawatts.

Nvidia and OpenAI had previously discussed the chipmaker’s providing $250 billion in financial backing for the Ohio data center.

Nvidia also said on Monday that it had agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank that will build, own and operate the data center in Ohio.

Nvidia has taken other steps to finance the A.I. boom. Last week, the company and six giant asset managers, private equity firms and banks announced an effort to raise $500 billion in financing for Nvidia’s customers to pay for chips, data centers and computing power.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

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