Nvidia has agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the US power and infrastructure developer backed by SoftBank and OpenAI, in a deal that hands the chipmaker up to 8 gigawatts of AI computing capacity at an Ohio campus being built for OpenAI.

It is the latest move in a familiar pattern, one in which Nvidia keeps financing the very customers that buy its chips, and it folds neatly into the sprawling Stargate buildout that OpenAI and SoftBank have been assembling across the American Midwest.

The mechanics are more concrete than the arithmetic. The capacity sits at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus near Piketon, Ohio, where SB Energy is developing a site for OpenAI, with an initial 4.25 gigawatts running on Nvidia processors and networking gear.

Alongside it, SB Energy and SoftBank say they will build at least 10 gigawatts of new power generation and pour $4.2 billion into Ohio grid infrastructure, the unglamorous plumbing that all of this depends on and that tends to vanish behind the trillion-dollar talk.

SB Energy is not a new name in this story either. Founded in 2019, it took $1 billion from OpenAI and SoftBank back in January, split evenly between the two, earmarked for precisely this kind of data-centre infrastructure.

Nvidia’s cheque extends that arrangement rather than starting it, drawing the chipmaker formally into a partnership it had already been circling for the better part of a year.

Moreover, Nvidia has spent the past year bankrolling the ecosystem that consumes its chips, guaranteeing debt, taking equity stakes, and offering compute now for payment later, a strategy that has kept demand roaring while unsettling anyone who remembers how circular financing tends to end.

The company was, at one point, in talks to backstop as much as $250 billion of OpenAI’s data-centre borrowing, a promise it has since pared back while showing investors the equity it holds instead.

For OpenAI, the appeal is straightforward, since its credit is not investment grade and its appetite for power is close to bottomless.

Nvidia’s balance sheet lets SB Energy borrow on better terms, and the gigawatts keep coming, from Ohio to a planned 3.2GW site in Georgia.

Seen from Brussels, where regulators are already circling the concentration of AI infrastructure in a handful of American hands, the whole thing looks less like a partnership than a closed loop, with one company quietly underwriting the demand, the supply, and increasingly the electricity too.

Competition officials on this side of the Atlantic have a long memory for arrangements in which a dominant supplier also happens to fund its own market.

None of which is illegal, and much of it may prove shrewd if the demand for compute holds. But the credit markets have started to notice, with Nvidia’s own credit default swaps hitting records as its web of commitments has widened, and the more the firm guarantees, the more its fortunes and OpenAI’s converge into a single trade.

A $1.5 billion cheque is small change against that backdrop, and it is the direction of travel, rather than the size of any one payment, that ought to give European regulators, and perhaps a few Nvidia shareholders, pause.

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