PORTSMOUTH, Aug. 17 -- Jensen Huang had a simple answer for everyone who wondered whether Nvidia was lending money to its biggest customer and calling it an investment. "No," the Nvidia chief executive wrote Sunday. "OpenAI will pay the lease."

Whether that settles the question depends on how closely you read the numbers that came attached to the answer.

Nvidia confirmed Monday that it will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a clean-energy developer majority-owned by SoftBank, under a deal that gives OpenAI exclusive rights to the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio. The initial footprint covers 4.25 gigawatts of computing infrastructure - enough to house roughly 1.5 million Nvidia GPUs at full deployment - with an option t...