NVIDIA (NVDA.US) is deepening its partnership with OpenAI in the artificial intelligence infrastructure space. According to the latest financial filings, NVIDIA has agreed to provide up to approximately $105 billion in funding support for a massive data center campus in Ohio, which will be leased by OpenAI upon completion and will deploy NVIDIA AI chips at scale.

OpenAI announced Monday that it has signed agreements to secure up to approximately 8 gigawatts (GW) of computing capacity from a data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, with the first 800 megawatts (MW) expected to come online before 2028. For context, 1 GW of power is sufficient to meet the electricity demands of up to roughly 750,000 U.S. households at any given moment, underscoring the immense scale of energy and computing power involved in this project.

Under the terms of the agreement, OpenAI will not be required to bear the full lease costs upfront. Instead, payments will begin only after the corresponding computing capacity is built and available for lease. NVIDIA, for its part, stated that it will support "certain portions of lease and electricity payments" for the project. Given that the data center is expected to house a large deployment of NVIDIA AI chips, this arrangement will further expand the use of NVIDIA hardware across OpenAI's computing infrastructure.

Beyond the up to $105 billion in related support, NVIDIA has also agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy Corp., a SoftBank-backed company that will be responsible for the construction, ownership, and operation of the data center campus. As currently planned, the Ohio project is poised to become one of the largest data center campuses in the world once completed, serving as the latest reflection of the rapidly surging demand for AI computing power.

The project is also among the major investment initiatives championed by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, and has received backing from the Trump administration, which views such investments as a key achievement in expanding AI infrastructure across the United States.

Notably, while the $105 billion support package is substantial, it remains below what has been previously discussed in market circles. Earlier reports indicated that NVIDIA had discussed providing guarantees of up to $250 billion for OpenAI's data center leases. NVIDIA has been increasingly supporting AI companies in expanding their infrastructure through investments and guarantees in recent years. The company previously provided financial support to AI cloud service provider CoreWeave (CRWV.US) and has made direct investments in both OpenAI and Anthropic. This latest arrangement with OpenAI represents NVIDIA's largest such support agreement to date.

However, as AI infrastructure investments continue to scale up, market observers are beginning to focus on the off-balance-sheet liabilities that companies may accumulate through these special arrangements, as well as potential "circular financing" concerns. This refers to a dynamic where NVIDIA provides funding to AI companies, which then use those funds to purchase NVIDIA chips, creating a cycle between funding and revenue. NVIDIA has explicitly stated that the Ohio project does not constitute circular financing. The company emphasized that the ultimate data center lease costs will be borne by OpenAI, stating that "OpenAI will pay the rent."

This collaboration further demonstrates that as AI computing construction enters the tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars range, NVIDIA's role is evolving from a pure AI chip supplier to an infrastructure financing facilitator. By providing funding support for large-scale data center projects, NVIDIA can help core customers like OpenAI address the financing challenges associated with massive computing buildouts, while also potentially driving further growth in demand for its own AI chips. As of the time of writing, NVIDIA shares were up 0.7% to $226.725.