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The chip vendor is now the mortgage lender. Nvidia's $105 billion commitment to an Ohio AI campus is not a gift to OpenAI and not a deposit; it is vendor financing for "defined portions of lease and power payments" on a 20-year compute build that Nvidia's chips will exclusively fill, while Nvidia also holds equity in the off-taker, SB Energy. The unit of account for AI infrastructure has shifted from chips sold to chips financed.
The number that makes this legible is eight gigawatts. A single gigawatt powers roughly 750,000 homes, so the campus OpenAI is leasing will eventually draw load equivalent to a city of six million. Capital used to scale with equipment on the balance sheet. This scales with the offtake contract.
A chip supplier extends partial credit to an operator, takes equity in that operator, and supplies the only hardware that operator can run. A 20-year lease locks in demand for the next several chip generations. Nvidia gets a guaranteed buyer for its silicon; OpenAI gets the cheapest possible financing for compute it would have funded anyway; SoftBank's SB Energy gets a balance sheet strong enough to break ground without waiting on a hyperscaler offtake.
The "circular financing" worry reads the structure as paper. The lease is real, and Huang's "defined portions" qualifier is what keeps those payments off Nvidia's reported revenue while putting them on the project's books. Stakes: Nvidia binds OpenAI's roadmap to its own; OpenAI trades some pricing power for capacity it could not otherwise underwrite.
Reported by Sky for Type0, from Nvidia provides $105B in financing toward OpenAI's massive Ohio data center — will be one of biggest in world. Read the original: nypost.com