Cassidy: Nvidia's writing a two-hundred-fifty-billion-dollar check to build OpenAI's data centers — the chip supplier is now bankrolling the
Cassidy: customer's real estate.
Cassidy: For anyone joining us mid-arc, here's the short version: SK Group and NVIDIA have more than $500 billion in letters of intent in motion.
Cassidy: SK Telecom is slated to build a two-gigawatt Vera Rubin DSX AI factory
Cassidy: while SK hynix is working with NVIDIA on next-gen memory
Cassidy: including HBM. All along, we've been asking how that announced scale turns into deployable capacity in Korea.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Five infrastructure stories, zero model launches, and a lot of very large numbers that suddenly have names attached.
Bill: Cassidy, start with the big one.
Bill: If this story matters to you — NVIDIA-SK AI factory partnership — hit follow.
Bill: We'll be back on it soon.
Cassidy: Here's Al Jazeera:
Quote: The $250bn deal which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal
Quote: would help the ChatGPT owner lease a 10-gigawatt project that SB Energy
Quote: a subsidiary of SoftBank
Quote: is building in Piketon
Quote: Ohio 68 miles (109km) south of Columbus Ohio.
Cassidy: So Nvidia's reportedly guaranteeing a $250 billion lease for OpenAI in Piketon, Ohio — and that's just the building.
Cassidy: The chips inside are another $350 billion, and Huang says he's in talks for that too.
Bill: Half a trillion for one campus in southern Ohio.
Bill: Ten gigawatts, 800 megawatts online by 2028 — enough to power 640,000 homes, per Al Jazeera.
Cassidy: The structure is what gets me.
Cassidy: Nvidia has moved past selling silicon into this thing and is now guaranteeing its customer's data-center lease.
Cassidy: Chip supplier and financier, same balance sheet.
Bill: And the power comes from a separate $33 billion US-Japan deal for a gas plant, on land the DOE leased to SoftBank.
Bill: So before a single token gets served, you've got Nvidia, OpenAI, SoftBank, and two governments in the counterparty stack.
Cassidy: A public-private partnership to build, quote, the world's largest AI data center.
Cassidy: Everybody's a partner until someone has to explain who's on the hook if the lease goes sideways.
Cassidy: This one's from Stock Titan:
Quote: Axe Compute Inc.
Quote: announced a new five‑year customer contract with total committed value of over $1.5 billion to deploy a dedicated NVIDIA Blackwell‑based AI
Quote: infrastructure cluster in the United States.
Quote: With previously announced Build agreements, 2026 signed contracted value now exceeds $3 billion.
Bill: Okay, this is the filing I actually wanted: an 8-K, not a press release.
Bill: Axe Compute, a name most of you have never typed, just locked in a five-year contract worth over $1.5 billion.
Cassidy: And it lands the same week as that $250 billion Nvidia-OpenAI number we just walked through.
Cassidy: That headline sets the mood.
Cassidy: Here, the money actually shows up in an unglamorous securities filing.
Bill: Here's the part that matters: 2026 signed contracted value now tops $3 billion.
Bill: Back on the 24th when we were picking apart Alphabet's contracted-versus-letter-of-intent fog
Bill: this is exactly the kind of disclosure I wanted.
Bill: Committed value. Take-or-pay.
Bill: Over $534 million in prepayments landing within 30 days.
Cassidy: And Axe owns the hardware — 9,200-plus Blackwell B300s.
Cassidy: It designs and operates the cluster, then keeps the hardware after the contract ends.
Cassidy: Axe is the operator holding the asset, with no capacity reseller in the middle.
Bill: Which is great right up until every one of these builds is standing in the same HBM4 line waiting on the same silicon.
Bill: Prepayments don't conjure memory chips.
Cassidy: Still, one deal takes the run rate from $385 million to nearly $700 million.
Cassidy: That kind of jump is real demand showing up in the numbers.
Cassidy: From RCR Wireless News:
Quote: Korean carrier SK Telecom has established a dedicated subsidiary to accelerate the development of hyperscale AI data center infrastructure
Quote: creating a new company focused on building up to 15GW of AI data center capacity across South Korea over the coming decade.
Quote: The company’s board approved the creation of SK Hyper
Quote: alongside an investment commitment of up to KRW 750 billion ( $540 million) through 2030 to support site acquisition
Quote: substation construction
Quote: and other infrastructure required for future AI campuses.
Cassidy: Remember that $500 billion SK-NVIDIA letter of intent we walked through on the 26th?
Cassidy: It's got a name now.
Cassidy: SK Telecom just spun out SK Hyper as the dedicated entity to actually build the thing.
Cassidy: SK Hyper has to secure land, build and run the substations, and bring in customers.
Cassidy: The plan calls for 15 gigawatts across Korea through 2030.
Bill: So they stood up a subsidiary.
Bill: Great. An org chart doesn't conjure a single megawatt or one stick of HBM4.
Bill: And watch the numbers — the summary says $540 billion, while the body says 750 billion won, or $540 million.
Bill: Those are three orders of magnitude apart.
Bill: Somebody's decimal is doing a lot of traveling.
Cassidy: The one clean read is the substation line.
Cassidy: Whoever wrote that looked past the chips and went straight to the constraint: getting power to the rack.
Bill: Right. New entity, same bottlenecks.
Bill: The Rubin queue and the grid don't care what the box on the org chart is called.
Cassidy: Manju AB, writing in The Financial Express:
Quote: CtrlS Datacenters has secured ₹5,500 crore in debt financing from State Bank of India(SBI) and Central Bank of India for its upcoming data
Quote: centre campus in Hyderabad
Quote: giving a major boost to one of India’s major digital infrastructure projects.
Quote: SBI has sanctioned a loan of ₹4,000 crore, while Central Bank of India will provide ₹1,500 crore, bank sources said.
Bill: This is the one that closes the loop for me.
Bill: New York froze 50 megawatts of data-center build back on the 24th.
Bill: CtrlS just funded a 3.5-gigawatt campus in Hyderabad.
Bill: Capital doesn't wait for a grid permit — it buys a plane ticket.
Cassidy: And it's ₹5,500 crore from SBI and Central Bank of India — the country's two biggest public-sector lenders.
Cassidy: State-backed money is bankrolling AI factories.
Cassidy: That puts India on the map we started drawing with Alphabet's $811B.
Bill: The structuring detail matters, though.
Bill: Project finance now, lease-rental discounting later.
Bill: Banks are treating a compute campus like commercial real estate, which tells you they expect durable tenant demand.
Cassidy: Sovereign and state capital is showing up on every continent this week
Cassidy: from Nvidia funding OpenAI to SK Hyper in Korea and now SBI in Hyderabad.
Cassidy: Five straight days of this, and I've stopped pretending it's the sidebar.
Bill: Yeah — Monday, the story was one company's capex.
Bill: Now it looks like a synchronized global bet.
Bill: And the failure modes are boring: HBM4, megawatts, and whether the tenants actually sign.
Cassidy: Here's SendTech Times:
Quote: The hardware order covers 27,500 Nvidia Rubin GPUs
Quote: 13,750 Nvidia Vera CPUs and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking for the FRONTia facility
Quote: which is scheduled to start construction in April 2027 and operations in June 2028.
Quote: Model development will begin before the site is ready.
Cassidy: Look at the order of operations here.
Cassidy: Japan, through METI, is putting ¥387 billion behind Noetra to build domestic robotics models, while the model-access terms are still open.
Cassidy: Japan is funding the compute before it knows who gets to run what on it.
Bill: And look at the hardware order: 27,500 Nvidia Rubin GPUs, 13,750 Vera CPUs.
Bill: That's the same Rubin platform going into the Korea builds.
Bill: Japan just joined the memory queue behind everybody else.
Bill: So HBM4 is now a shared bottleneck.
Bill: Korea, then Japan — everybody's serialized on the same next-gen silicon, and construction doesn't even start until April 2027.
Cassidy: And that's the funny part.
Cassidy: The 44-member group includes Sony
Cassidy: NEC Honda and SoftBank
Cassidy: plus a whole domestic-sovereignty pitch — and it all runs on imported Nvidia hardware.
Cassidy: They've chosen the chip before they have an inference story of their own.
Bill: Standing up the consortium is the easy part.
Bill: Nobody in that room has explained where the interim capacity comes from before FRONTia lights up in 2028.
Bill: They haven't even named all the interim providers yet.
Cassidy: If you follow AI’s infrastructure story, check out The Data Center Daily.
Cassidy: It covers hyperscaler spending, the power grid, semiconductor supply, and how AI at scale is reshaping energy markets.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: What we're watching starts with Axe Compute, which expects more than $534 million in aggregate customer prepayments within 30 days.
Cassidy: Construction on Noetra’s FRONTia facility is scheduled for April 2027, with operations beginning in June 2028.
Cassidy: In Ohio, if that deal goes through, the project is expected to deliver up to 800 megawatts of electricity by 2028.
Cassidy: You’ll find links to every story in the show notes if you’d like to dig deeper.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.