Nvidia in Talks to Invest $3B in SoftBank's SB Energy for OpenAI Data Center

NVDA is in talks to invest as much as $3 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary developing a large planned data center campus in Ohio for OpenAI, The Information reported. The structure is split: roughly half would go in when the Ohio project deal is signed, and the other half would come through SB Energy's planned IPO, which the company is targeting as soon as next month and which could raise at least $5 billion.

The equity cheque is the small part. The same reporting places the $3 billion inside a much larger arrangement in which Nvidia would provide credit support for the Ohio campus, on the order of $100 billion. Notably, Nvidia has already revised that exposure downward, and is now expected to initially guarantee less than $120 billion against the $250 billion figure discussed earlier. That revision is the detail worth tracking, because it is the first sign of Nvidia calibrating how much balance-sheet risk it will absorb to accelerate customer buildouts.

SB Energy, founded in 2019 and also backed by OpenAI, develops large-scale power and data center infrastructure. Power, not silicon, is the binding constraint on AI capacity today, which explains why a chip vendor is writing equity cheques into an energy developer at all. The pattern is familiar and increasingly scrutinized: Nvidia takes a position in a customer or a customer's supplier, and that entity buys Nvidia hardware.

For investors the question is how much of Nvidia's demand is arm's-length. Circular financing is not inherently improper, but it does make revenue quality harder to assess and concentrates risk if the AI capex cycle slows. Watch three things: whether the Ohio deal is actually signed, the terms and reception of the SB Energy IPO, and whether the guarantee figure moves again from the sub-$120 billion level.

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