Nvidia has agreed to cover up to $105 billion of OpenAI’s rent if OpenAI can’t pay.
Last week, reports put OpenAI’s yearly sales pace $18 billion below the figure investors had heard in late September. Shares of Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave fell the day the reports came out. All three sell chips or computing power to AI labs like OpenAI. Their growth depends on whether those labs can keep paying for what they’ve agreed to buy.
The filings below show which companies bear the risk if OpenAI’s sales grow more slowly than expected. They also show the size of each company’s commitments to its AI customers.
1. OpenAI: $50 billion or $68 billion
OpenAI told its investors that its annualized revenue was roughly $50 billion at the end of September. Annualized revenue takes what a company earned over a recent stretch, such as a month, and multiplies it out to a full year. It tells you how fast sales are coming in today.
In late September, news reports had put that figure at $68 billion. According to a person familiar with OpenAI’s finances, that larger figure included revenue from OpenAI’s partners in addition to OpenAI’s own sales.
OpenAI is a private company. It doesn’t publish audited financial reports the way public companies must. Investors who want verifiable figures have to look at the reports of public companies that do business with OpenAI.
2. Nvidia: up to $105 billion
SB Energy is developing a large data center campus in Ohio. OpenAI has agreed to rent space on the campus and run Nvidia’s AI systems there.
Nvidia has signed guarantees that back OpenAI’s leases with SB Energy. If OpenAI goes bankrupt or stops paying rent, Nvidia pays SB Energy the difference between a minimum lease value set in the agreements and whatever SB Energy recovers by renting the space to someone else or selling it. Nvidia’s payments are capped at $105 billion. OpenAI has agreed to pay Nvidia back for anything Nvidia pays out. The guarantee ends once OpenAI earns a strong enough credit rating, the grade lenders give a company based on how likely it is to pay its debts. Until OpenAI earns that grade, Nvidia’s guarantee protects SB Energy from losing income on the leases. The leases start when the first buildings open, expected in 2028.
3. Oracle: $664 billion in backlog
Oracle has $664 billion in remaining performance obligations. That’s the total value of contracts customers have already signed for services Oracle hasn’t delivered yet. Think of a landlord who signs a tenant to a five-year lease. From the day the lease is signed, the landlord knows five years of rent is coming. Each month’s rent still comes in one month at a time. Oracle expects to earn about 13% of its backlog, roughly $86 billion, over the next 12 months. Oracle says the backlog grew from $455 billion a year earlier mainly because of a few very large cloud contracts. It doesn’t say who signed them. You can’t tell how much of the $664 billion depends on OpenAI.
Last quarter, Oracle spent $28.5 billion on data centers and equipment. Its day-to-day business brought in $23.1 billion in cash. Customers paying in advance made up $11.4 billion of that cash. In the same quarter, Oracle raised $19.9 billion by selling new shares. It pays to build its data centers today. Its customers pay for the computing power inside them over the life of their contracts.
4. CoreWeave: one customer, 36% of revenue
CoreWeave rents out computing power built on Nvidia chips to AI companies. Three customers paid 72% of its revenue last quarter. The largest one accounted for 36% on its own. If that one customer cut back, CoreWeave would lose about a third of its sales. CoreWeave hasn’t identified the customer, but it does disclose two of its largest contracts. OpenAI agreed in September 2025 to pay CoreWeave up to about $6.5 billion for computing power through May 2031. Meta agreed in March 2026 to pay up to about $21 billion through December 2032. CoreWeave expects OpenAI and Meta to become major customers in the years ahead.
5. Applied Digital: CoreWeave’s landlord
Applied Digital builds and owns data centers, then leases them to companies that run AI computing inside them. Its first campus, Polaris Forge 1, is leased to CoreWeave. CoreWeave pays that rent out of the revenue it earns from its AI customers.
Last quarter, Applied Digital collected $65.8 million in base rent and recorded $77.4 million in interest expense. It has signed leases for 1.41 gigawatts of capacity across five campuses, worth about $36 billion in rent over their initial terms. Only 250 megawatts of that is built and running today. That’s less than a fifth, since a gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts. The company carried $6.4 billion in debt at the end of last quarter. It also earned $35.8 million in interest on $3.7 billion in cash on hand. After that income, its net interest cost was $41.6 million, below its base rent of $65.8.
Last week, paid subscribers got a calculator for finding the break-even point of an AI system that still depends on human oversight, built from the Presto Automation SEC case.