OpenAI signed a 20-year lease for an 8-gigawatt Ohio campus, with Nvidia guaranteeing up to $105 billion. The deal turns land, power, and building shells into the new strategic bottleneck of the AI buildout.
Key facts
- 8 GW IT capacity in 20-year lease
- $105B Nvidia residual-value guarantee
- $3T off-balance-sheet AI commitments (WSJ)
- 9.2 GW gas plant powers the site
- First 800 MW online in 2028
OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease with SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy for the "PORTS-Pike" campus in Ohio, securing around 8 gigawatts of IT capacity. The Wall Street Journal puts the project's gross total at 10 gigawatts once cooling and infrastructure are factored in. The site sits partly on a former US Department of Energy uranium enrichment facility and draws power from a 9.2-gigawatt gas plant that the US government owns and Japan is financing According to The Decoder.
Nvidia is backing the project with up to $105 billion, but the structure is not a simple rent guarantee. Per the WSJ, Nvidia backs the residual value of the finished data centers in the first construction phase, which covers 4.25 gigawatts of IT capacity. If OpenAI walks away, SB Energy must find a replacement tenant and try to sell the facilities; only then does Nvidia cover the difference, 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 Bloomberg reports.
Off-balance-sheet commitments reach $3 trillion
The WSJ analysis shows nine tech companies now hold around $3 trillion in AI commitments that don't appear on any balance sheet. Analysts warn that investors can barely gauge actual debt levels anymore. This deal is the clearest example yet: OpenAI's lease obligations are real, but they don't show up as liabilities on its financial statements.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the shift with a new acronym: "LPS" — land, power, and shell. According to Huang, these basics have replaced chips and networking gear as the real bottleneck in the AI buildout. AI labs like OpenAI are growing faster than their balance sheets can support long-term infrastructure contracts, so Nvidia is stepping in with its financial muscle.
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; the first 800 megawatts are slated to come online in 2028.
Key Takeaways
- OpenAI leased 8GW Ohio site; Nvidia backs $105B residual value.
- WSJ: $3T off-balance-sheet AI commitments.
What to watch
Watch for the first 800 MW coming online in 2028 and whether Nvidia exercises its option on the remaining 3.75 GW. Also track OpenAI's Q3 2026 financial disclosures for any lease-liability recognition, and whether regulators push for balance-sheet treatment of these off-book commitments.
Source: the-decoder.com
[Updated 17 Aug via the_decoder]
Nvidia will also invest $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy, months after OpenAI and SoftBank jointly injected $1 billion into the data center developer [per SCMP]. This equity stake deepens Nvidia's financial entanglement with the project, complementing its role as exclusive chip supplier and residual-value guarantor.
