Is this circular financing? Structurally, no — Nvidia isn’t buying its own chips back through an investee. Functionally, yes: Nvidia puts $1.5 billion into SB Energy, backstops up to $105 billion in credit for the Ports-Pike site’s lease and power payments, and in return locks in exclusive rights to supply compute there for 20 years. The company isn’t just selling GPUs anymore; it’s underwriting the real estate they sit on, then guaranteeing itself as the only vendor who can occupy it.
The financing math has already moved once. CNBC reported Nvidia was earlier in talks for a backstop as high as $250 billion for a 10-gigawatt version of the site, before the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the guarantee had been trimmed to under $120 billion. Monday’s SEC filing landed at $105 billion for an initial 4.25 gigawatts, scalable to 8. That compression matters more than the headline number: it suggests either Nvidia or its counterparties pulled back exposure as scrutiny of vendor financing intensified — scrutiny that sharpened last week when Nvidia joined six asset managers, including BlackRock, on a separate $500 billion third-party financing platform for data centers.
Nvidia isn’t just selling GPUs into this buildout anymore — it’s underwriting the real estate, then guaranteeing itself as the only vendor allowed to occupy it.
The site itself is a small irony machine: a former uranium enrichment plant that fueled the U.S. nuclear arsenal is being reindustrialized to host AI compute, paired with a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas plant pegged at $33 billion — a figure inflated by the 66% rise in natural-gas plant construction costs over two years, per BloombergNEF cited in the original TechCrunch report. That gas plant, and others like it under construction nationally, will compete with LNG export markets for the same fuel, a dynamic that could triple regional gas prices, according to the same reporting. For an industry that treats power procurement as the binding constraint on AI scaling, that’s a cost line every hyperscaler and neocloud operator should be watching, not just OpenAI.
SoftBank’s position adds another wrinkle: it sold $5.8 billion of Nvidia stock in November to fund other AI bets, and is now co-developing a site where Nvidia buys back in as an investor and financier. Jensen Huang has floated that the Ohio campus alone could generate up to $200 billion in Nvidia revenue, part of a projected $600 billion from OpenAI by 2030 across 16 gigawatts of compute — numbers reported by Reuters via Yahoo Finance that turn a single real-estate deal into a referendum on whether AI infrastructure spending is demand-driven or vendor-financed. The number worth citing on its own: Nvidia’s $105 billion credit guarantee is the chipmaker underwriting the very lease payments that will eventually flow back to it as GPU revenue.
What would change the read: whether OpenAI’s usage and revenue actually fill 4.25 gigawatts on schedule starting in 2028, and whether Nvidia’s guarantee gets invoked — meaning OpenAI defaults and Nvidia has to make the site owner whole. Either event would test Huang’s claim that this is scale-and-visibility lending, not circularity.
By the time SB Energy's power plant and others are completed, they'll be competing for natural gas with export markets, a confluence that could triple natural gas prices in some parts of the country.
