Nvidia Just Cosigned OpenAI's Rent, Up to $105 Billion of It

TL;DR

Nvidia filed an 8-K on August 17 disclosing that it has signed residual value guaranties, cumulatively capped at $105 billion, backing leases for roughly 4.25 gigawatts of IT load at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio. The tenant on the 20-year lease is OpenAI. The landlord is SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed power-and-data-center developer, which will build at least 10 GW of new generation to feed 8 IT-gigawatts of AI factory capacity on the site of the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War uranium enrichment complex. Nvidia becomes the exclusive compute provider for the whole campus and is putting $1.5 billion of equity into SB Energy on top. If OpenAI stops paying rent, Nvidia covers the shortfall. In writing. With the SEC.

A uranium plant's second act

The joint press release is unusually concrete for an AI infrastructure announcement. SB Energy will build, own, and operate the campus and lease it to OpenAI for 20 years. The site spans private and federal land around the old Portsmouth plant, which spent the Cold War enriching uranium for the U.S. government and is now being reindustrialized in collaboration with AEP Ohio, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Commerce. Capacity comes online in phases starting in 2028.

The scale is the headline number people will remember: at least 10 GW of new energy generation, yielding 8 IT-gigawatts of compute. That edges out even Amazon's 7.65 GW off-grid gas campus in Texas as the largest single-campus commitment announced so far.

SB Energy and SoftBank are also committing at least $4.2 billion to new regional grid infrastructure with AEP Ohio, in a structure the release says is designed to protect ratepayers. The Wall Street Journal and CNBC report roughly 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 permanent positions, and the community benefits fund lands at $80 million after OpenAI doubled SB Energy's original $40 million.

The cosigner clause

The interesting document is not the press release. It is the 8-K itself, filed under Item 1.01 and, tellingly, Item 2.03: "Creation of a Direct Financial Obligation or an Obligation under an Off-Balance Sheet Arrangement."

Here is the machine. Nvidia signed multiple residual value guaranties with SB Energy covering leases for about 4.25 IT-gigawatts, with an option, exercisable at Nvidia's sole discretion, to extend credit support to the remaining roughly 3.75 IT-gigawatts. If OpenAI becomes insolvent or simply fails to pay rent, SB Energy tries to re-let the premises or sell the site. Whatever it recovers gets netted against a guaranteed minimum lease value set in the agreements, and Nvidia pays the difference, up to a cumulative cap of $105 billion for the initial commitment.

If you have ever cosigned an apartment lease for a kid fresh out of college, you already understand this deal: the landlord does not trust the tenant's income, so someone with real credit signs underneath. Nvidia is the parent here, SB Energy's lenders are the landlord, and the kid is a company reportedly headed for hundreds of billions in compute obligations. On a trigger event, Nvidia can assume the lease, force a re-letting, force a sale, let the lease die, or defer the whole decision for up to a year while covering specified project costs.

Two clauses deserve framing. First, OpenAI has agreed to reimburse and indemnify Nvidia for every dollar Nvidia actually pays out, a promise from the same entity whose failure to pay is the trigger. Second, each guaranty terminates early if OpenAI achieves "a satisfactory credit rating." Until that day, OpenAI's credit rating is, functionally, Jensen Huang's signature.

Follow the money

Line up the dollar figures in this deal and the structure becomes obvious: the backstop is the deal. Everything else is garnish.

Why would Nvidia carry this? Because the guarantee is what makes the campus financeable. Lenders funding SB Energy's buildout no longer have to price the risk that a money-losing AI lab walks away from a 20-year lease; they get to price Nvidia's investment-grade balance sheet instead. In exchange, Nvidia gets something it has never had before: exclusivity written into the land. The campus exists to host Nvidia compute, full stop, and OpenAI will deploy Nvidia's full-stack DSX platform there, "subject to limited exceptions" per the filing.

This is the next step in a progression we have been tracking all month: Nvidia lining up $500 billion in third-party capital to finance GPU purchases, and big tech burying roughly $3 trillion of AI commitments in lease footnotes. Item 2.03 says the quiet part in the filing's own vocabulary: this is an off-balance-sheet arrangement, of the exact species the WSJ spent last week adding up. Nvidia has moved from selling chips, to investing in its customers, to underwriting its customers' landlords.

What it means for builders

If you build on OpenAI's APIs, this is your 2028-and-beyond capacity pipeline taking physical form: 8 IT-gigawatts, single tenant, one chip vendor. Model pricing and availability two years out depend on projects like this one actually energizing on schedule, and this one now has the strongest financial backstop in the industry attached.

If you are betting on the non-Nvidia stack, note what the moat just became. AMD, Groq-style neoclouds, and custom silicon programs are competing not just with CUDA anymore but with a vendor willing to guarantee $105 billion of real estate risk to lock a campus to its hardware for 20 years. That is not a price war any chip startup can join.

And if you care about the system's stability, the circularity is now formalized: Nvidia guarantees the lease of the tenant who buys its chips, holds equity in the landlord alongside the tenant, and is indemnified by the tenant for any guarantee payments. Every party's downside is another party in the same diagram.

The fine print

• Each guaranty only becomes effective when its lease commences, and payment obligations are conditioned on SB Energy meeting ready-for-service requirements, expected beginning in 2028. Nothing is owed today.
• The $105 billion is a cumulative cap on the initial 4.25 GW commitment, not a check. Nvidia pays only a residual shortfall after re-letting or sale, and only on OpenAI insolvency or nonpayment.
• The option on the remaining ~3.75 IT-gigawatts is entirely at Nvidia's discretion and carries no disclosed commitment yet.
• The actual agreement text is not public until Nvidia's next 10-Q, for the quarter ended July 26, 2026. Everything above is the 8-K's own summary of it.

Key Takeaways

• Nvidia signed SEC-disclosed residual value guaranties capped at $105 billion backing OpenAI's 20-year lease at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike campus in Pike County, Ohio.
• The campus targets 8 IT-gigawatts of AI factory capacity fed by 10+ GW of new generation, on the site of a decommissioned Cold War uranium enrichment plant, phasing in from 2028.
• Nvidia becomes the exclusive compute provider for the entire campus and is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy, whose backers already include SoftBank and OpenAI.
• OpenAI indemnifies Nvidia for any guarantee payments, and the guaranty dissolves if OpenAI ever achieves a satisfactory credit rating.
• The structure makes the buildout financeable against Nvidia's balance sheet instead of OpenAI's, extending the off-balance-sheet pattern now spanning trillions across the AI buildout.

Sources: Nvidia Form 8-K (SEC, Aug 17, 2026), Nvidia / SB Energy / OpenAI press release (SEC Exhibit 99.1), SiliconANGLE, CNBC