Nvidia (NVDA), OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) , and SB Energy are teaming up to build a massive 8-gigawatt data center facility in Ohio.
Nvidia will provide upward of $105 billion in financing to secure the land, power, and shell for the site. Initial plans call for the facility to offer 4.25 gigawatts worth of computing capacity, with the option to increase that by another 3.75 gigawatts in the future.
SB Energy will ultimately build and own the site, known as the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, which OpenAI will then lease for 20 years. Nvidia is making a $1.5 billion investment in SB Energy as part of the arrangement.
The complex will exclusively use Nvidia GPUs, which the company says could amount to some 1.5 million chips or roughly $150 billion to $200 billion in potential revenue for each generation deployed at the site through 2030.
Taken together, the new deal, combined with Nvidia’s prior agreements with OpenAI, could total as much as $600 billion for the company.
In a blog post Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote that the deal does not constitute circular investing. Circular investing, in which a company invests in a customer, which then purchases equipment from the investing firm, has raised concerns about inflated sales numbers.
“Nvidia uses its scale and long-term visibility to secure PORTS-Pike to host Nvidia compute,” Huang wrote.
“This is the same discipline we apply to supply-chain management: we secure critical inputs when we have visibility into customer demand and when doing so enables long-term productive capacity.”
He also noted that Nvidia will only pay for portions of lease and power payments, not the full cost of the site or OpenAI’s obligations.
Nvidia has been on a deal-making spree, using its vast balance sheet to invest in the likes of Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, SK Hynix, and setting up a $500 billion fund alongside Wall Street powerhouses, including BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Apollo, to allow data center builders to finance the purchase of Nvidia chips.
Note: Apollo is the parent company of Yahoo Finance.
