Nvidia Adds $1.5 Billion Equity Stake and $105 Billion Backstop to SB Energy's Ohio AI Campus

Since SoftBank's SB Energy disclosed in draft IPO paperwork that it handed OpenAI $5.5 billion in stock warrants to secure its tenancy, new financial details have surfaced showing just how tightly Nvidia, SoftBank and OpenAI are now bound together on a single Ohio construction site.

Nvidia announced on August 17, 2026 that it will invest $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer building the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, according to Crypto Briefing and CNBC reporting cited by the National Association of Manufacturers. On top of the equity check, Nvidia committed up to $105 billion in residual value guarantees, a credit backstop meant to make lease financing for the project easier to obtain, per ENR and NAM.

What Nvidia's Money Buys

The campus sits on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a decommissioned federal uranium enrichment site. OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease requiring that all AI compute infrastructure at the site come exclusively from Nvidia, according to ENR. The initial phase will deliver 4.25 gigawatts of capacity, with an option to expand to 8 gigawatts total, and the broader project targets 10 gigawatts of new power generation, roughly 9.2 GW of it from natural gas, ENR reported.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the move as an extension of the company's supply-chain strategy. "AI factories require a full stack of critical resources: advanced chips, packaging, memory and networking, as well as land, power and shell," Huang wrote in a company blog post cited by ENR. Huang estimated each generation of Nvidia systems deployed at the site could represent roughly 1.5 million GPUs and $150 billion to $200 billion in Nvidia revenue over time.

SB Energy CEO Rich Hossfeld told CNBC, as reported by ENR, that his company's role is development: securing land, building power, and constructing the shells. "If you think of a maybe $500-billion project, our role is 30 to 40 percent of that," Hossfeld said.

Critics have raised concerns that Nvidia is essentially financing the customers who buy its own chips. Gadgets Now reported that Huang has dismissed those concerns directly, arguing that OpenAI, not Nvidia, will be the one paying the lease on the campus. Simply Wall St's analysis takes a more cautious view, noting that by acting as exclusive compute provider and offering credit support on land, power and shell, Nvidia is now more exposed to how efficiently these mega-sites get built and used, not just to chip demand itself.

Draft IPO documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, as reported by Quartz, give the clearest picture yet of SB Energy's financial position. The company's net loss widened to $3.2 billion in the first half of 2026, up from around $250 million in the same period a year earlier, driven largely by swings in the estimated value of its warrant liabilities to OpenAI. Its renewable energy unit brought in about $140 million in revenue in the same period, up 66% year over year.

The filing itself, according to Quartz, flags SB Energy's heavy reliance on OpenAI as a named risk factor, warning that any weakening of OpenAI's finances could hurt SB Energy. The documents also disclose that SB Energy's ability to fund the Ohio campus depends meaningfully on Nvidia's residual value guarantee, and that Nvidia separately committed $3 billion through two private transactions tied to the IPO, one of which lets Nvidia buy shares at a 10% discount to the offering price. SB Energy has signed contracts for nearly 9 gigawatts of capacity, mostly tied to Ohio, but has only 800 megawatts under construction and no data centers currently operating, Quartz reported.

On the ground, reaction is mixed. Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer told the Guardian his emotions "range between positive and skeptical," and said there has been little organized local opposition or public debate about the project. Environmental groups have raised concerns because the site sits on the former uranium enrichment plant, which Pike County residents have long blamed for above-average cancer rates. A nearby middle school closed in 2019 after high radiation readings were recorded in the building, according to the Guardian.

No source in this reporting establishes a current contamination link between the decommissioned plant and the planned construction, and none of the parties involved have been accused of wrongdoing tied to the site's history. The concern raised by environmental groups is about siting a massive new industrial project on ground with that legacy, not about a proven hazard from the AI campus itself.

Spencer also flagged a separate risk: the project is tied to Japan's $550 billion investment pledge made in exchange for lower U.S. tariffs, an arrangement that could unravel if a future administration changes trade policy, the Guardian reported. SB Energy's IPO, meanwhile, is expected to price as soon as next month at a projected valuation near $50 billion, according to Crypto Briefing and Quartz, with the campus not slated to open until 2028.