Nvidia expands into AI infrastructure financing with massive $500B data center push

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 Nvi...