Nvidia in Talks to Pour Up to $3 Billion Into SoftBank's SB Energy for OpenAI's Ohio Mega Data Center

Nvidia is reportedly negotiating a stake worth as much as $3 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer building a multi-gigawatt data center campus in Ohio for OpenAI. The talks were first reported by The Information, which cited people familiar with the discussions. Neither Nvidia nor SoftBank has confirmed the terms publicly, and outlets including Reuters have said they could not independently verify the details.

Nvidia & SB Energy's Deal at a Glance

• Investment size: Up to $3 billion in SB Energy
• Payment structure: Half funded when the broader Ohio agreement is signed, half tied to SB Energy's upcoming IPO
• Separate credit talks: Nvidia is also discussing roughly $100 billion in credit support for the Ohio campus, distinct from the equity stake
• IPO outlook: Could launch as soon as next month, potentially raising at least $5 billion

SB Energy's Role in Stargate

SB Energy, founded in 2019, develops large-scale power and data center projects. It has become a key infrastructure partner for OpenAI's compute expansion under Stargate, the roughly $500 billion multi-year initiative to build AI training and inference capacity across the United States, running on NVIDIA's next generation of AI infrastructure.

The Ohio talks build on an earlier round of funding. In January:

• OpenAI and SoftBank each contributed $500 million, totaling $1 billion, to SB Energy
• The money went toward a separate 1.2-gigawatt site in Milam County, Texas
• SB Energy agreed to become an OpenAI customer, deploying ChatGPT internally and building on its APIs

SB Energy co-CEO Rich Hossfeld described the goal at the time as helping accelerate delivery of advanced AI data center campuses at the scale required to support Stargate.

What's Being Built in Ohio

• Site located in the Piketon area, on land tied to the U.S. Department of Energy
• Eventual capacity target of roughly 10 gigawatts
• First phase targeting approximately 800 megawatts by 2028
• Dedicated to OpenAI's training and inference workloads

A single gigawatt can power several hundred thousand homes, which puts the scale of this campus in perspective against typical grid infrastructure.

Why Nvidia's Guarantee Shrank

The equity talks run alongside a separate negotiation over Nvidia's financial backstop for the project, and that figure has moved.

The Wall Street Journal reported Nvidia's planned guarantee now sits at under $120 billion, down from an earlier figure of $250 billion. The original, larger number stemmed from a plan where Nvidia would guarantee financing so OpenAI could lease the Ohio campus directly:

1. OpenAI lacks an investment-grade credit rating
2. That normally raises SB Energy's borrowing costs on construction loans
3. Nvidia's guarantee lets lenders treat the debt as if OpenAI carried that higher rating
4. Cheaper borrowing makes the build financially viable at this scale

The lower figure suggests the three parties have been redistributing risk as talks progress.

The Logic Behind Nvidia's Stake

Two forces explain why a chipmaker would want equity in a power and infrastructure developer:

• Guaranteed Nvidia hardware demand. Nvidia previously issued a letter of intent to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of its Nvidia GPUs at SB Energy sites, turning the Ohio campus into a multi-year hardware commitment.
• Faster deployment. Chip supply is no longer the primary constraint on AI scaling; grid connections and physical build-out timelines are. Funding the developer directly can shorten those timelines.

For OpenAI, the structure shifts construction and financing risk onto partners better equipped to carry it, letting the company focus capital on model training and product development instead.

Where This Fits in the Broader Buildout

Stargate counts Oracle among its backers and received public support from President Donald Trump when it was announced in January 2025. Meta Platforms has made comparable commitments of its own toward chips and power infrastructure, reflecting an industry-wide shift toward vertically funding compute capacity rather than simply purchasing it.

OpenAI's push for this infrastructure coincides with rising costs to train and run its models, alongside intensifying competition from Google's Gemini. Reports suggest this pressure has prompted an internal focus on ChatGPT over other product lines.

What Comes Next

None of the reported terms are final. Points still likely to shift before signing include the exact payment split for Nvidia's stake, the final guarantee amount, and the IPO timeline.

The clearer signal is structural: Nvidia is moving from chip supplier to financial partner in the infrastructure its processors will run on, a shift that ties its revenue more directly to how quickly AI data centers get built rather than just how many chips ship into them.