Huang Defends Nvidia-OpenAI Deal, Sees $600 Billion Compute Opportunity
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back on criticism that his company's deal to support OpenAI's massive Ohio AI buildout is 'circular financing.'
No, according to Huang, OpenAI will pay the lease for its compute capacity at the campus. In fact, Nvidia estimates that the broader infrastructure plans of OpenAI could represent roughly $600 billion in Nvidia compute through 2030.
Nvidia has invested $1.5 billion in SB Energy, which is building and operating the physical infrastructure at PORTS-Pike. The campus will exclusively host Nvidia GPUs, CPUs, networking, and software, with OpenAI securing about 8 GW of compute capacity.
Huang framed Nvidia's support as a way to secure scarce infrastructure rather than finance demand, noting that frontier AI labs are 'growing faster than their balance sheets and long-term credit profiles can support.'