Nvidia is no longer content just selling the shovels in the AI gold rush. The company is now helping finance the mines, too.
The chipmaker and South Korea’s SK Group announced a partnership valued at over $500 billion to develop large-scale AI data centers, sometimes called AI factories. Separately, Nvidia is reportedly in talks to provide a financing guarantee of roughly $250 billion to back OpenAI’s ambitious data center project in southern Ohio, a venture being led by SoftBank.
What the SK Group deal actually looks like
The centerpiece of the Nvidia-SK partnership is a massive AI data center that SK Telecom plans to build. The facility will run on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips, its next-generation GPU architecture, paired with high-bandwidth memory from SK Hynix.
The planned facility is enormous: a two-gigawatt data center. The first phase is expected to come online in 2027, driven by what both companies describe as escalating demand for AI compute infrastructure.
SK Hynix already supplies a significant portion of the world’s high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips that sit alongside GPUs to feed them data fast enough to keep up with AI workloads.
The OpenAI financing angle
Nvidia is simultaneously negotiating a financing guarantee of around $250 billion to support OpenAI’s proposed $500 billion data center project in Ohio. That project is being spearheaded by SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
A financing guarantee from Nvidia would be unusual territory for a semiconductor company. Chipmakers traditionally sell components and move on. They don’t typically underwrite the construction of the facilities that house their products.
Goldman Sachs and the broader financing landscape
Goldman Sachs has been actively publishing research and analysis on AI infrastructure capital expenditure trends and the surging demand for data center capacity, though the bank has no confirmed role as a financing partner in either of the $500 billion deals.
The recent announcements have sparked broader debate about the sustainability and risks associated with funding large-scale AI projects, particularly as Nvidia’s involvement in customer financing expands. Nvidia is simultaneously the dominant GPU supplier, a potential financier of data center construction, and a technology partner in the facilities themselves.