Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $3 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary developing a massive planned data center campus in Ohio for OpenAI, according to a report by The Information published Saturday. The move would take Nvidia deeper into the energy infrastructure layer of the AI economy than the chipmaker has ever gone before.
According to the report, which cited people familiar with the discussions, the proposed investment is part of broader negotiations between Nvidia, OpenAI, and SB Energy over roughly $100 billion in credit support for the planned Ohio data center project. Nvidia has discussed investing half of the $3 billion when the Ohio project deal is signed and the other half as part of SB Energy's planned initial public offering, The Information reported. CNBC and Reuters carried the report on Saturday. For more context on this story, see our ongoing more AI stories.
A stake in the power behind the chips
SB Energy, founded in 2019 and also backed by OpenAI, develops large-scale power and data center infrastructure projects and is building several data center campuses to support rising demand tied to AI workloads. The company became a recurring name in the AI infrastructure story in January, when OpenAI and SoftBank announced a $1 billion investment in the firm as part of the industry's massive AI buildout, as CNBC reported at the time.
According to The Information's report, SB Energy is aiming to go public as soon as next month and could raise at least $5 billion in the IPO. An investment tied to that listing would give Nvidia a direct financial interest in one of the key power players underpinning OpenAI's compute expansion — a striking shift for a company whose core business has historically been selling the accelerators that go inside the buildings, not financing the electricity that runs them.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report, and Nvidia and SB Energy did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours. Neither OpenAI nor SoftBank has publicly confirmed the terms under discussion.
The deal follows a scaled-back guarantee
The reported SB Energy talks come just one day after the Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia has revised its plans to support the proposed OpenAI data center project in Ohio and is now expected to initially guarantee less than $120 billion, down from the $250 billion previously discussed. The revision followed sustained investor pressure on Nvidia to rein in the circular financing arrangements that have come to define the AI infrastructure boom, in which chip suppliers, cloud providers, and model developers invest in one another to keep construction flowing.
Read together, the two reports sketch a picture of Nvidia recalibrating rather than retreating. The company appears to be pulling back from an enormous blanket guarantee while simultaneously negotiating a smaller, more targeted stake in the energy infrastructure that makes such projects viable in the first place. Electricity — not land, and increasingly not even chips — has become the binding constraint on AI data center construction, and grid-scale power developers like SB Energy now sit at a choke point of the entire buildout.
Why energy is the new frontier for AI capital
The AI industry's appetite for power has grown faster than most grids can accommodate, pushing hyperscalers and chipmakers alike toward energy deals that would have looked exotic just two years ago. Analysts and industry observers have repeatedly warned that gigawatt-scale AI campuses will live or die on their ability to secure firm power capacity, and market analysts framed Nvidia's reported $3 billion move as a bet that power infrastructure is where the next layer of AI value will be captured.
For Nvidia, an equity position in SB Energy would serve several purposes at once. It would help anchor the credit support package that OpenAI's Ohio campus needs to reach financial close. It would align Nvidia with SoftBank, one of its most important strategic partners in Japan and the United States. And it would give the company exposure to the IPO of an infrastructure developer whose valuation story is directly levered to the same AI demand curve that drives Nvidia's own bookings.
What to watch next
Several milestones will determine whether the reported framework becomes reality. The signing of the Ohio project agreement would trigger the first half of Nvidia's reported investment, while SB Energy's IPO — potentially as soon as September, according to The Information — would set the stage for the second. Any final terms could still change, as the discussions are ongoing and no deal has been announced.
The negotiations also land at a delicate moment for market sentiment around AI infrastructure spending. Nvidia's earlier decision to shrink its OpenAI guarantee was widely read as a concession to investors worried about the concentration of risk among a small circle of AI counterparties. A disciplined, smaller-ticket investment in the power layer may prove an easier story for Nvidia to sell — one that keeps the Ohio project moving while capping the chipmaker's direct exposure.
For OpenAI, the arrangement would keep its most ambitious data center plans on track at a moment when its compute demands are compounding. And for SoftBank, an Nvidia cheque arriving alongside a public listing would validate its long-running bet that the AI era would eventually be as much about megawatts as about models.
None of the parties has confirmed the talks, and past AI infrastructure negotiations have shifted shape repeatedly before closing. But the direction of travel is clear: the companies building the AI economy are now underwriting the power plants that will run it, and the reported SB Energy deal would make that trend concrete in a single $3 billion line item.
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