Nvidia Weighs $3 Billion Stake in SB Energy
The proposed investment is tied to OpenAI’s planned Ohio data center and about $100 billion in credit support.
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Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $3 billion in SoftBank Group’s SB Energy as part of a proposed data center project in Ohio for OpenAI, The Information reported on Saturday, 15 August.
Under the proposal, Nvidia would invest about $1.5 billion when the Ohio deal is signed and a further $1.5 billion when SB Energy goes public, the report said.
Neither Nvidia nor SB Energy has publicly confirmed the investment talks.
The discussions form part of wider negotiations between Nvidia, OpenAI and SB Energy over $100 billion in credit support for the Ohio project, according to the report.
SB Energy is seeking an initial public offering as early as September that could raise at least $5 billion. The company, which develops energy and data center infrastructure, is backed by OpenAI and SoftBank. OpenAI and SoftBank each invested $500 million in SB Energy earlier this year.
The Ohio campus is planned at up to 10 gigawatts, a scale that would make it one of the largest AI infrastructure projects under consideration in the US. OpenAI has been discussing leasing the capacity as it seeks substantially more computing power for training and operating its models.
Nvidia’s potential equity investment comes as the structure of its financial support for the project continues to change. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Nvidia was expected to initially guarantee less than $120 billion in financing, down from as much as $250 billion previously discussed.
The talks show how Nvidia’s role in the AI buildout is extending beyond supplying GPUs. The company is increasingly considering investments and financing arrangements around the data centers that will ultimately become customers for its chips.
That creates a tighter link between Nvidia’s capital and demand for its hardware as AI companies pursue infrastructure projects whose costs can run into hundreds of billions of dollars.
