Nvidia invested $1.5 billion in SB Energy, funding the data center OpenAI will fill with Nvidia GPUs and booking revenue twice on one deal. Off-balance-sheet AI obligations across major hyperscalers have ballooned to $3 trillion, all resting on AI revenue assumptions no one can yet verify. Investor pressure forced Nvidia to cut its Ohio project financial backstop from $250 billion to $120 billion, though the GPU financing pipeline stayed intact.
It sounds nuts, but SoFi1 is giving new Active Invest users up to $3,000 in stock for a limited time, and all it takes is a $50 deposit to get started.2 See for yourself (Sponsor) Wall Street spent most of 2026 debating whether Big Tech's AI spending was real demand or a financing trick dressed up as a boom. The $1.65 trillion in Big Tech off-balance-sheet obligations that Nikkei tallied in July gave that debate teeth. Investors want to know who's actually paying for the data centers powering the AI trade, and increasingly, the answer traces back to the same company selling the chips inside them.
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has spent this year positioning itself not just as AI's arms dealer but as its banker, landlord, and now equity partner. This morning, that strategy got another data point: a $1.5 billion investment in SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer building OpenAI's newest data center campus in Ohio. It's a small check by Nvidia's standards, but what it reveals about the company's financing playbook is not.
Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy and lock in up to 8 gigawatts of AI computing capacity at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio. The initial phase covers 4.25 GW, with SB Energy building, owning, and operating the facility under a 20-year lease to OpenAI. SB Energy and SoftBank are also committing $4.2 billion to regional grid infrastructure, part of a plan for at least 10 GW of new power generation.
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That number is smaller than it first appeared. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Nvidia trimmed its financial backstop for the project from $250 billion to less than $120 billion, and that the guarantee now covers only the buildout's first phase. Investors had pushed back hard on the original figure -- Nvidia shares fell 5% when it first surfaced -- and management listened.
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