OpenAI has signed a twenty-year lease for the largest data centre project announced to date. The deal comes with Nvidia guaranteeing up to $105 billion in backing.
The Ohio deal
OpenAI has secured an eight-gigawatt site from SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy. The location is the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio. It sits partly on a former US Department of Energy uranium enrichment facility. Power comes from a 9.2-gigawatt gas plant owned by the US government and financed by Japan under a trade agreement.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls this arrangement “LPS”. This acronym stands for land, power, and shell. He states that these basics have replaced chips and networking gear as the main bottleneck in the AI buildout.
The Wall Street Journal reports the project’s gross total is 10 gigawatts once cooling and infrastructure are factored in. The first 800 megawatts are slated to come online in 2028.
How the money works
Nvidia is not guaranteeing OpenAI’s rent payments. Instead, it backs the residual value of the finished data centres in the first construction phase. This phase covers 4.25 gigawatts of IT capacity.
If OpenAI walks away, SB Energy must first find a replacement tenant. Then it tries to sell the facilities. Nvidia covers the difference in value only after that, capped at $105 billion. In return, Nvidia becomes the exclusive chip supplier for the first half of the site and is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy.
Huang expects around 1.5 million GPUs per system generation, or $150 to $200 billion in revenue. Across all sites, he puts OpenAI’s commitments through 2030 at roughly 12 gigawatts of Nvidia compute. If Nvidia exercises its option on the remaining 3.75 gigawatts in Ohio, the package grows to about 16 gigawatts worth roughly $600 billion. OpenAI says it only pays for finished capacity.
Three trillion dollars stay off the books
A Wall Street Journal analysis shows how large these commitments have become across the industry. Nine tech companies, including Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia, hold around $3 trillion in mostly AI-related obligations that do not appear on their balance sheets.
Leases only get recorded once payments begin. Purchase commitments only appear when goods are delivered. Leases that have not started yet add up to $1.2 trillion, four times as much as a year earlier. At Alphabet, purchase commitments jumped from $332 billion to $811 billion within three months.
The contracts are nearly impossible to cancel. Both Alphabet and Amazon recently reported negative free cash flow. Morgan Stanley analysts warn that investors can barely gauge these companies’ actual debt levels anymore.
The WSJ had already reported that Nvidia originally wanted to backstop the entire project with around $250 billion. It scaled back the guarantee after a 5 percent stock drop and pressure from investors. The final $105 billion cap comes in below the $120 billion figure that circulated most recently, and it only covers the asset value rather than the full lease.
What it means
For the people building AI systems, the focus has shifted from buying hardware to securing the physical site and the electricity supply. Nvidia is stepping in with its financial muscle to cover the risk of empty buildings. This changes the dynamic for makers who need to know their infrastructure will exist when they are ready to scale.
