The numbers shrank — twice
Nvidia will guarantee up to $105 billion for OpenAI's planned data center campus in Pike County, Ohio — a figure disclosed in an SEC filing tied to a partnership signed Monday. That is a long way from the roughly $250 billion guarantee the company was initially considering, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and CNBC.
The rollback happened in stages. The Journal reported on August 14 that Nvidia had already cut the commitment to 'less than $120 billion.' The companies then settled on $105 billion when the deal was signed. The SEC filing describes the figure as an 'aggregate payment obligation' capped at that level.
Nvidia and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Fortune.
What the deal actually funds
Nvidia's guarantee is structured to help SB Energy — the SoftBank-backed developer building the campus — secure financing by supporting certain lease and power payments and guaranteeing the value of parts of the completed infrastructure if OpenAI were to default. That structure limits Nvidia's direct financial exposure.
Separately, Nvidia is investing $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy, and will serve as the exclusive chip provider for the initial phase of the project. The campus is expected to scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts to as much as 8 gigawatts of computing capacity.
The first 800 megawatts are expected to come online in 2028, largely using existing AEP infrastructure, according to OpenAI. Subsequent phases will require new power plants — including natural gas generation — plus new transmission lines. SB Energy plans to build a 9.2 gigawatt natural gas power plant on the site, a former U.S. Department of Energy uranium-enrichment facility. That plant alone is expected to cost $33 billion, reflecting a 66% rise in natural gas plant construction costs over the last two years, according to BloombergNEF.
The circular-financing concern
The reduction in Nvidia's guarantee tracks a recurring anxiety in AI markets: the world's dominant GPU maker is increasingly helping finance the infrastructure that creates demand for its own chips. When reports surfaced in July that Nvidia could guarantee as much as $250 billion, the company's shares fell roughly 4.5% intraday on investor concern about circular financing.
Last week, Nvidia partnered with six major financial institutions to launch compute-financing platforms targeting more than $500 billion in third-party funding for AI infrastructure. A regulatory tailwind arrived in July, when SEC staff guidance concluded that certain data-center debt falls outside Dodd-Frank securitization rules — making it easier for Nvidia to mobilize outside capital rather than carry the exposure itself.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back on the circular-financing framing, saying in a press release the company was 'securing long-lived infrastructure for Nvidia compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories that can be upgraded repeatedly with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics.'
Reuters noted that anxiety about the sustainability of AI investment persists despite record market performance, with investors focused on enormous capital expenditures, rising debt, and uncertainty over when that spending generates returns.
The market has already voted — cautiously
The $145 billion reduction is not a collapse of the deal; it is a recalibration, and the SEC filing gives it legal weight. But the trajectory — $250 billion floated, $120 billion reported, $105 billion signed — tells its own story. Capital rewards clear rules and transparent return profiles. What it penalizes is the appearance that an industry is writing checks to itself.
The Ohio campus is ultimately a test of whether AI revenue from outside the AI ecosystem can justify the scale of spending being financed from within it. Until that outside revenue is visible in earnings, the circular-financing question will shadow every headline figure Nvidia puts in an SEC filing — no matter how large or how carefully structured.
