NVIDIA backs $105B in leases for OpenAI Ohio data center, mobilizes $500B financing platform

NVIDIA is increasingly underwriting the demand for its own chips. The company committed to guarantee up to $105 billion in leases over 20 years for an 8-gigawatt OpenAI data center in Ohio, and invested $1.5 billion in the project's developer, SB Energy. In parallel, it partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to establish financing platforms mobilizing over $500 billion of third-party capital for AI compute infrastructure.

The mechanism is what CNBC called NVIDIA's moat 'shifting from chips to capital': by guaranteeing leases and mobilizing external financing, NVIDIA de-risks the massive buildouts its customers must undertake to buy its GPUs, effectively priming the demand pump. The $500B platform brings the balance sheets of the world's largest asset managers and banks into AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale.

That structure is exactly what alarms critics. Community reaction was sharp: 'Nvidia is effectively co-signing loans used to purchase its own silicon... contractually bound to cover 25% of losses,' one widely-shared take noted, fueling fears of a vendor-financed compute bubble. The circular dynamic — NVIDIA financing customers who buy NVIDIA chips — draws comparisons to telecom-era vendor financing that ended badly. This is an older (August 18) story but remains a defining structural question for the industry. Readers should watch whether other AI-infra deals adopt similar guarantee structures, and how rating agencies and regulators treat the off-balance-sheet exposure.