Nvidia Backs an 8-Gigawatt Ohio Campus, and the AI Ledger Tops $880 Billion

TL;DR

• The AI Compute Deal Ledger added 4 rows this week: $106.0 billion of new binding value and 4,315 MW of new binding capacity. The running binding total is now $880.2 billion on 13.22 GW, up from $774 billion and 8.90 GW last week.
• Nvidia guaranteed up to $105 billion in residual value backing a 20-year OpenAI lease at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Ohio: 4.25 GW signed, with an unquantified option on roughly 3.8 GW more. Nvidia is also putting $1.5 billion of direct equity into SB Energy. This formalizes, and replaces in the totals, the reported $250 billion backstop talks logged back in July.
• Duos Technologies and Axe Compute signed two separate, additive hosting deals: 10 MW for $111 million at Columbus, Georgia in July, and 55 MW for $500 million+ across new sites this month. Neither had a ledger row until this week.
• HIVE Digital's BUZZ HPC subsidiary signed a $350 million, five-year GPU cloud contract for 2,016 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs, counterparty undisclosed.
• Still blocked: CoreWeave and Hudson River Trading announced a "multi-billion-dollar" cloud deal with no number attached, and Sharon AI's contract cluster gained a Q2 print showing $1.93 million of actual revenue against $8.8 billion of claimed contract value.

The Board

The largest number on the ledger is a promise to cover a default, if OpenAI ever misses a payment.

What $105 Billion Actually Buys

Nvidia isn't spending $105 billion. That's the cap on a residual value guaranty: Nvidia backstops SB Energy's leases at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, a former uranium-enrichment site in Pike County, Ohio, so that if OpenAI ever defaults on its 20-year lease, Nvidia covers the shortfall. The guarantee applies to 4.25 GW of IT load in the initial signed phase. Nvidia can also extend further credit support to roughly 3.8 GW more, at its own discretion, with no dollar figure attached to that second tranche.

Layered onto the guaranty: Nvidia is putting $1.5 billion of direct equity into SB Energy, joining SoftBank Group and OpenAI as investors, and SoftBank/SB Energy have separately committed $4.2 billion to regional grid infrastructure. Neither of those figures is in the $105 billion, and neither is in this week's ledger total either. The first 800 MW of capacity is targeted online in 2028; the rest of the eventual 8 GW campus follows by the end of the decade.

This is the same project the ledger logged as reported talks back on July 27, when WSJ and CNBC described Nvidia weighing a backstop of up to $250 billion for a rumored 10 GW campus. Those numbers didn't survive contact with the actual SEC filing: the signed guarantee caps at $105 billion on 4.25 GW plus an unquantified option, well short of the $250 billion and flat 10 GW that got reported in July. I've marked the old row superseded rather than deleting it. The reported range was real reporting at the time; it just isn't what eventually got signed.

Every leg of this deal is circular by construction. Nvidia guarantees the lease. Nvidia invests equity in the landlord. Nvidia is the exclusive chip vendor for the campus the guarantee and the equity are both propping up. None of that makes the $105 billion fake. It does mean the number measures Nvidia's contingent exposure. Actual goods and services changing hands this year come to a much smaller figure, and I'd treat any headline that skips that distinction as less useful than it sounds.

Two Small Public Companies, One Real Pattern

Duos Technologies, a rail-inspection company turned data center landlord, signed Axe Compute (Nasdaq: AGPU) to two separate hosting agreements four weeks apart. The first, from July 16, was 10 MW for $111 million over five years at Duos's Columbus, Georgia campus. The second, from August 17, added 55 MW for over $500 million across new, unnamed sites, explicitly described in both companies' releases as "in addition to" the Columbus deal rather than a restatement of it. I backfilled the July deal alongside the August one once Axe Compute's own filing confirmed the same $111 million figure from the other side of the table.

Neither deal has tier-1 news coverage. Both are corroborated by a primary press release from each counterparty, which is a real form of independent sourcing even without a Reuters byline: Duos and Axe Compute have no obvious reason to agree on the same numbers unless the numbers are real.

HIVE Digital's BUZZ HPC unit signed a five-year, $350 million GPU cloud contract built around 2,016 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs at HIVE's hydro-powered facility in Merritt, British Columbia. The customer is disclosed only as "an investment-grade enterprise customer." I logged it with the counterparty flagged unnamed, the same treatment already applied to undisclosed tenants at Hut 8 and Applied Digital: the dollar figure and the GPU count are independently verifiable against HIVE's own filings even when the buyer isn't.

What's Still Blocked

CoreWeave and Hudson River Trading announced a multi-year cloud deal built on Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 systems for the quant trading firm's research platform. CoreWeave's own chief revenue officer called it "multi-billion-dollar" and then declined to give a number. That's a real deal with real sourcing on both a company release and independent Bloomberg reporting, and it's also not a ledger row, because the ledger needs a disclosed dollar value or a disclosed MW figure and this deal has neither. It's logged in the candidate queue instead. If either side names a number later, or an earnings call attaches one to it, it moves in.

Sharon AI's disclosed contract cluster hasn't grown this week, but the picture around it got sharper. An August 20 filing confirmed customer acceptance of Phase 1 under the existing $950 million APAC contract, releasing escrowed cash. That's a milestone on a deal already in the ledger, sourced only to Sharon AI's own release, so it doesn't move the verification question either way. More useful: the company's Q2 2026 results, reported earlier this month, showed $1.93 million of actual revenue against the $8.8 billion of total contract value it claims across five deals. That gap doesn't prove the contracts are fake. It's exactly the kind of gap a short-seller report flagged back in April, and I'm not promoting any of the four unverified contracts in that cluster while it sits there unexplained.

Also reviewed and passed on: AIB Data Centers, a recently rebranded shell whose "570 MW pipeline" is explicitly disclaimed in its own filing as non-binding; Datavault AI's "Project Qestrel," a tokenized-GPU concept with no signed customer contract; and a new ARC Group Acquisition II SPAC registration that mentions GPUs only in boilerplate risk language, with no target named at all.

The One-Line Read

Nvidia's $105 billion is a guarantee against default, not a purchase order, and it's still the largest number this ledger has logged. Everything else added this week, about $961 million, came from small public companies whose press releases happened to agree.

Sources: SEC filings and press releases from Nvidia, SB Energy (via Nvidia's newsroom), Duos Technologies, Axe Compute, HIVE Digital Technologies and CoreWeave, cross-checked against CNBC, Bloomberg and Axios reporting where cited above. Every figure links to its row in the full ledger, browsable per company on pages like Nvidia's entity record, Duos Technologies' and HIVE Digital's.