Nvidia weighs up to $3B stake in SoftBank power arm SB Energy

Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $3 billion directly into SB Energy, the SoftBank-controlled power developer building the 10-gigawatt Ohio campus that OpenAI has lined up to lease, The Information reported. That would put Nvidia's cash inside the entity building the site and the power to run it, not just the entity leasing the GPUs on top.

The context matters. SB Energy has already pulled in more than $1.8 billion over the past year from SoftBank, OpenAI and Ares Management, and quietly filed a confidential draft for a US IPO earlier this year. A pre-IPO check from Nvidia would validate the story SB Energy plans to tell public-market buyers: that the largest announced AI campus in the country is anchored by the industry's dominant chip supplier as an owner, not just a customer.

It also fits a pattern. Nvidia has already agreed to put up to $3 billion into Blackstone-backed Lancium, the developer wiring the Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, starting with a $2 billion equity check for roughly 20% of the company and another $1 billion tied to milestones. That sits alongside Nvidia's scaled-back Ohio guarantee this week, which covers the same Piketon project and came in at under $120 billion versus the $250 billion originally floated. Read together, Nvidia is spreading smaller equity chips across the power layer even as its lease-backstop numbers get trimmed by risk-averse debt markets.

The report is thin on structure. It does not say whether the $3 billion would be equity, preferred, or milestone-based, when the check would land relative to the IPO, or how it interacts with the shrunken Ohio guarantee. SB Energy is also heavily levered to OpenAI as its anchor tenant, so the cap table rides one customer's demand curve. But for a company that has repeatedly told investors GPUs are worthless without electrons, buying into the power developer is the logical next move, and it is unlikely to be the last one this year.