Nvidia Bets $3 Billion on Power Infrastructure as Washington and Huawei Test Its Grip
Published on 09/22/2026 at 06:00 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Nvidia is no longer content to sell the engines of the AI boom. It now wants to own the sockets they plug into. Under a freshly signed agreement, the chipmaker has committed up to $3.0 billion to SB Energy, a developer of data centers and the power systems that feed them — a move that pushes the company deeper into financing the physical backbone of its own demand.
The structure of the deal is two-pronged: $1.5 billion for non-voting Class N shares through a private placement, alongside a $1.5 billion prepaid forward transaction. SB Energy's pipeline tells the story of why. The developer holds 8.8 gigawatts of data centers either under construction or under contract, anchored by the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio. That site will start with 4.25 gigawatts of capacity, is leased long-term to OpenAI, and is designed to run exclusively on Nvidia processors.
A Backstop That Rewrites the Risk Map
The Ohio project carries an obligation that dwarfs the equity check. Nvidia has issued a residual value guarantee of up to $105 billion, part of a maximum risk exposure of $108.5 billion. In plain terms, the company is underwriting the resale value of its own customers' infrastructure — absorbing a chunk of the marketing risk that would normally sit with the operators.
That arrangement cuts both ways. If hyperscalers and AI developers hit their monetization targets, Nvidia locks in demand well into 2027 and cements its technological lead. If they stumble, the contingent liabilities land squarely on the chipmaker's balance sheet. Investors will need to track actual utilization rates at the new mega-campuses and whether partners like OpenAI keep meeting their contractual offtake commitments.
Huang's Output Pledge Meets a Widening Ecosystem
Chief executive Jensen Huang is not hedging. He said last week that Nvidia intends to ship twice as many chips next year as it does in the current one, following the company's guidance of roughly 70% growth for the fiscal year ending January 2028. Huang also pushed back firmly on fears of existential AI risk, arguing that demand for compute still far outstrips global supply and rejecting any deliberate slowdown in development.
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The operational evidence is stacking up. The Vera Rubin NVL72 platform posted top-tier results at its debut in the MLPerf Inference v6.1 benchmark on Thursday. On the software side, the open-source CUDA-Q Logical platform gained a layer for fault-tolerant quantum applications. Nvidia is also building outward: with Google and Emerald AI, it launched the AI Energy Management Alliance on Thursday to help data centers integrate more flexibly with power grids, and in Australia it struck partnerships that Reuters reports will more than double the country's data center load.
The commercial web keeps widening. A collaboration with Palantir Technologies on sovereign AI for supply chains shows how far the company has burrowed into critical infrastructure, while a scheduled quarterly dividend of $0.25 per share — payable to holders of record on September 10 — underscores the strength of its cash position.
China's Door Creaks Open
One of the sharpest potential catalysts sits in Washington's hands. KeyBanc estimates demand for H200 chips in China at nearly $30 billion. Should regulatory approvals reopen sustained access to that market, Nvidia's already brisk data center segment would receive a substantial revenue jolt, with long-term US supply agreements underpinning baseline utilization for years. Signals on export licenses for the H200 line are expected this week and could determine whether the stock can break out to fresh highs.
Skeptics See a House of Cards
Not everyone is convinced. Bloomberg points to mounting warnings from the financial industry that the sector's funding architecture resembles an unstable stack. A cooling in capital expenditure budgets, the argument goes, could trigger abrupt downward revisions to earnings estimates across the entire ecosystem — all the more so as persistently high interest rates make refinancing data centers more expensive.
Michael Burry has added his voice, flagging the massive off-balance-sheet obligations of the major cloud providers and warning about emerging rivals such as chip developer Etched, whose specialized inference hardware could threaten Nvidia's margins. If alternative processor architectures capture meaningful share while existing mega-projects miss their return targets, the lattice of residual value guarantees could turn from an asset into a burden.
Regulatory and Competitive Pressure Builds
Dominance of this scale inevitably draws scrutiny. Reuters reports that the US Department of Justice is examining a licensing agreement between Nvidia and AI chip startup Groq, probing whether the transaction was deliberately structured to sidestep antitrust review. The inquiry signals that American regulators are now looking closely even at licensing deals that might appear defensive.
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Abroad, Huawei is preparing its own challenge. The Chinese company announced Thursday that it will bring the Ascend 960DT and 960PR AI accelerators to market in 2027, and — notably — is positioning its UnifiedBus technology as a direct alternative to Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect. Western markets remain largely closed to Huawei, but the announcement shows the global leader faces determined resistance across Asia.
The Record Mark Is the Line to Watch
The stock closed yesterday at EUR 198.36, leaving it just 2.0% below its 52-week high. On the current trading day it added 1.7% to reach EUR 196.32, roughly 3.1% shy of that peak of EUR 202.50. So long as the shares defend these levels and customers honor their contractual obligations without delay, the uptrend holds.
But if operator investment sentiment sours, or supply bottlenecks force delays in bringing the giant data centers online, the market's focus could shift quickly from growth rates to balance-sheet exposure. The operational machine is running at full tilt — the political and competitive terrain around it is getting rougher.
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