Tech and AI
Chipmaker caps its exposure at 105 billion dollars to stand behind a 20 year data centre lease in Ohio
By Staff Writer | 18 August 2026
NVIDIA has given residual value guarantees over leases for about 4.25 gigawatts of IT load at a campus in Pike County, Ohio, where OpenAI is the tenant and SB Energy is the landlord. A regulatory filing sets the cap, names the triggers and lists the guarantor's five options when they are pulled.
The announcement made on 17 August was reported as a data centre deal. The filing describes something more familiar to anyone who has papered a project: a landlord, a tenant of uncertain covenant strength, and a third party with deep pockets standing behind the rent.
SB Energy will build, own and operate the data centre at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus under a 20 year lease to OpenAI. NVIDIA is not the tenant. It has secured land, power and shell capacity at the site to host its own compute by guaranteeing the residual value of the leases rather than taking them itself.
AI is becoming infrastructure, the foundation for intelligence in every industry, and land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI. Now is the time to scale the AI infrastructure that will power the next industrial revolution.
Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive, NVIDIA
What the filing actually promises
The aggregate payment obligation is cumulatively capped at 105 billion dollars for the initial commitment, and each guarantee takes effect only when the lease it relates to commences.
The mechanism is a shortfall guarantee. Two events pull it: the tenant's insolvency resulting in a default under a lease, or the tenant's failure to make payments under a lease. On either, the guarantor pays generally the difference between the guaranteed minimum value of the lease and what is recovered through a replacement lease or a sale.
It then has five choices, set out in the filing as alternatives rather than as a sequence. It may assume the lease, require the landlord to try to relet the premises, start a sale process, or allow the lease to be terminated. Or it may defer all of those for up to a year while paying specified project agreement costs, which is the option that buys time in a market with no obvious replacement tenant.
Payment is conditional. The landlord must have satisfied the ready-for-service conditions under the lease for the premises in question, and those are expected to start being met in 2028. The obligations end on the earliest of four events: the twentieth anniversary of the lease commencing, termination by the tenant in accordance with the lease, the tenant achieving a satisfactory credit rating, and other customary termination events. The tenant has agreed to reimburse and indemnify the guarantor for any amounts paid.
The numbers that were reported wrongly
Three figures circulating on 17 August do not survive a reading of the primary records. The campus was widely called a 10 gigawatt data centre. The 10 GW is new energy generation the developer and its parent will build, which the release says results in 8 IT-GW of AI factory capacity. Those are different quantities and only the second is computing load.
The initial commitment was reported at 5 gigawatts. The filing puts the leases at approximately 4.25 gigawatts of IT load in aggregate, and the release uses the same figure. There is an option over the rest, which the release states as 3.75 IT-GW and the filing as approximately 3.8 gigawatts, exercisable in the guarantor's sole discretion.
A 250 billion dollar backstop was reported in July while terms were still being negotiated. The filed number is a cumulative cap of 105 billion dollars on the initial commitment, the only figure with a document behind it.
What is being built, and where
The campus reindustrialises the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and the land around it, spanning private and federal ground, and is being developed with AEP Ohio and the United States Departments of Energy and Commerce. Capacity is expected to come online in phases from 2028. Alongside the generation build sits at least 4.2 billion dollars of new regional grid infrastructure under an arrangement the parties describe as designed to protect ratepayers.
The community package runs to an initial 80 million dollars, the developer's originally announced 40 million dollar fund and a further 40 million from the tenant. NVIDIA is separately investing 1.5 billion dollars in SB Energy, joining SoftBank Group and OpenAI on the register.
The structure repays study by anyone drafting around a thin covenant. The credit sits with a guarantor rather than the tenant, the guarantee expires the moment the tenant becomes rateable, and the guarantor has bought itself a year of deferral before it must choose a remedy. The form of the agreements will be filed as an exhibit to the quarterly report for the period ended 26 July 2026, when the drafting will be readable rather than described.