As per the securities filing from Monday, Nvidia will finance up to $105 billion for a new artificial intelligence data center for OpenAI in Ohio.
This credit will enable the company to have an initial 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity with an option for 3.75 gigawatts additional capacity. Nvidia will provide the compute, and the capacity is estimated to come up in phases in 2028.
SB Energy will construct and operate the data center at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio through a 20-year lease to OpenAI. The frontier lab has shares in the company and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was an early investor in SB Energy.
“The reason we are securing long-lived infrastructure for NVIDIA compute is that OpenAI can create the most productive AI factories that can get repeated upgrades as every new generation gets more intelligent and better economics,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang commented in a statement.
CNBC has reported earlier that Nvidia was discussing the deal of providing a $250 billion backstop to OpenAI, which would enable it to raise debt for 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio.
CNBC had earlier reported that Nvidia was negotiating with OpenAI to offer a guarantee worth up to $250 billion, which would allow the model provider to borrow money for building a 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio.
The Wall Street Journal had last week reported that Nvidia was going to lower the guarantee to below $120 billion for the data center construction.
The move comes from Nvidia after it has made multiple financing moves for the large-scale data center construction in the AI industry.
Nvidia recently collaborated with six major asset managers to develop financing platforms for using $500 billion of external money on data centers.
As per the agreement, SB Energy and SoftBank will construct power generation sources that provide 10 gigawatts of electricity and also invest at least $4.2 billion in regional grid development. Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy.
In the press release, OpenAI claimed that the new data center will create 35,000 jobs in the construction sector up until 2032 and 2,500 permanent jobs thereafter.
This new data center will help OpenAI gain easy access to the high-quality chips and computing resources which are behind the entire AI technology.
In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said that computing is a “fundamental resource” for the industry.
“Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age,” he said.
