The numbers keep moving, but the direction is unmistakable. When Nvidia first floated its support for OpenAI’s planned Ohio data center in mid-August, the figure attached to that commitment stood at $250 billion. By the time CNBC reported on the project on August 17, the financing sum had settled at $105 billion. Reuters, meanwhile, pegged the revised guarantee at under $120 billion for an initial build-out phase of roughly five gigawatts.
The variance reflects different stages of the project’s rollout rather than confusion. What matters is the trajectory: smaller tranches, tighter oversight, and a decision on the remaining expansion deferred to a later date.
That scaling back is the real story — not because it signals weakness, but because it reveals how Nvidia is recalibrating its risk appetite in real time.
A chipmaker moonlighting as an underwriter
The Ohio project is just one thread in a much larger tapestry. Days earlier, Nvidia had corralled a consortium including Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, with the goal of channeling up to $500 billion into AI data center construction. To bring those financial heavyweights to the table, Nvidia is putting its own money on the line: it guarantees the resale value of its GPUs, covering up to 25 percent of any shortfall if the chips don’t hold their expected worth.
That’s essentially an insurance business grafted onto a semiconductor company. It’s an unusual posture, and it explains why the Ohio pullback reads more as discipline than retreat. When you’re moving capital on that scale, breaking the build into smaller pieces is prudent engineering.
Goldman Sachs has already begun sounding out insurers, asset managers and banks to form the core investor base, according to Reuters. Nvidia has also committed up to $3 billion to Lancium, the energy infrastructure developer behind the Stargate campus in Texas — including a $2 billion stake for roughly 20 percent of the company. A separate $1.5 billion direct investment in SB Energy, SoftBank’s power arm, rounds out the energy side of the equation.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nvidia?
The investment portfolio grows alongside the guarantees
Nvidia’s transformation extends beyond underwriting. About a month ago, it emerged that the company holds a position in SpaceX through its stake in xAI — 122.8 million Class A shares worth roughly $21 billion at the end of the quarter. That makes it Nvidia’s second-largest holding, trailing only its Intel stake, which stood at about $22 billion after starting the quarter at $30 billion.
The strategic logic is becoming clearer by the week. Elon Musk’s rocket company has said it will use Nvidia chips exclusively in its data centers and for AI models — a concrete example of how equity stakes and customer loyalty increasingly reinforce each other. Since that disclosure, Nvidia shares have added 8.9 percent.
The same pattern holds in the product arena. Nvidia has entered a long-term partnership with Safe Superintelligence Inc., with Bloomberg reporting an investment of $5 billion. The new open-source Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model is designed to run on a single graphics card, targeting autonomous AI agents. Separately, the company is developing the Nemotron 4 family of models, which Reuters reports is still in final training with no release date confirmed. Nvidia and SK Group have also deepened their collaboration on AI factories and next-generation memory technology.
What the share price says about investor sentiment
The market’s reaction to all this activity has been measured rather than euphoric. The stock closed at €189.72 on Tuesday, down 2.4 percent on the day and 2.5 percent over seven days, though it remains 6.5 percent higher on a monthly basis. At €190.56 currently, the shares sit roughly 5.9 percent below the 52-week high of €202.50 reached in mid-May. The recent pullback — including a 2.1 percent dip last week — looks more like a pause for digestion than a reversal, particularly against a 19 percent gain since the start of the year.
Investors are clearly weighing the dual nature of Nvidia’s new role. The company is no longer just selling chips; it’s financing the infrastructure that will consume them, and guaranteeing the residual value of its own products along the way. That shifts risk from the revenue line to the default-risk line — a distinction that matters when individual customers like OpenAI are central to the equation.
The trimming of the Ohio guarantee suggests Nvidia’s management is acutely aware of this tightrope. Whether the strategy pays off will come into sharper focus on August 26, when the company reports second-quarter results for fiscal 2027. The key question then won’t be how much Nvidia earns — its own revenue guidance stands at roughly $91 billion — but how much balance-sheet risk the company is willing to carry in pursuit of future growth.
Ad
Nvidia Stock: Buy or Sell?! New Nvidia Analysis from August 19 delivers the answer:
The latest Nvidia figures speak for themselves: Urgent action needed for Nvidia investors. Is it worth buying or should you sell? Find out what to do now in the current free analysis from August 19.
Nvidia: Buy or sell? Read more here...
