Nvidia to Back OpenAI Data Center With $105B Investment

Nvidia plans to provide up to $105 billion in financing for a new OpenAI data center in Ohio.The AI chip giant’s commitment was revealed in an August 17 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).Nvidia also revealed that it is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a U.S. data center company owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group, which is heavily involved in the Ohio project.The center is located at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, and Nvidia will be the exclusive provider of the compute, with SB Energy building, owning and operating the facility under a 20-year lease to OpenAI.Ultimately, the campus will deliver 8 gigawatts of compute capacity to OpenAI. Nvidia’s initial credit will support 4.25 gigawatts of this capacity, and it will have the option to take the remaining 3.75 gigawatts.The planned compute is expected to start coming online in 2028.According to Nvidia, the facility will use its infrastructure, including GPUs, CPUs and networking. The vendor said in a statement that this will deliver “resiliency across the full stack -- facilities, hardware, and software together -- reducing infrastructure overhead and accelerating time to tokens.”Related:Nvidia Partners With Wall Street Giants to Mobilize $500B for AIThe scale of the Ohio project is vast, with OpenAI claiming it will create 35,000 construction jobs during its six-year buildout, plus another 2,500 long-term operating positions. In tandem with SB Energy, it has also pledged to build power-generating facilities locally capable of delivering 10 gigawatts of energy and invest $4.2 billion in regional grid infrastructure.While the project has local support as an economic revitalization initiative at an old uranium enrichment site, critics warn of over intensive land use, pollution from gas turbines that will power the data center and a volatile funding structure.Nvidia continues to take a more prominent role in data center financing, having formed partnerships earlier this month with Wall Street firms Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish compute financing platforms that could generate more than $500 billion to build out AI infrastructure.This ever-increasing involvement has led to suggestions that arrangements for such financial arrangements and the Ohio project amount to circular financing. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang countered this in a blog post.Huang acknowledged the site will be lucrative for Nvidia, with each generation of AI factory system deployed in Ohio representing about 1.5 million Nvidia GPUs -- worth up to $200 billion.Related:SpaceX, Tesla to Spend $16.8B on Terafab Chip Factory in TexasAbout the AuthorContributing WriterGraham Hope has worked in automotive journalism in the U.K. for 26 years, including spells as editor of leading consumer news website and weekly Auto Express and respected buying guide CarBuyer.