TL;DR
- Nvidia is putting its balance sheet behind AI infrastructure: up to $105bn of guarantees for an OpenAI-linked Ohio data center, plus a $1.5bn investment in SB Energy.
- Anthropic is scaling its financing stack ahead of an IPO: a $10bn+ revolver, alongside roughly $15bn of financing being arranged for a Texas data center project.
- Dell’Oro has lifted its 2030 data center CapEx forecast to more than $3tn, up from $1.7tn just six months earlier.
- The bigger story is no longer just higher AI spending. The financing system around AI CapEx is expanding almost as quickly as the infrastructure itself.
Will Dell’Oro Group raise its 2030 data center CapEx forecast again by the end of 2026?
Nvidia: Up to $105bn of Support for an OpenAI Data Center
Nvidia has agreed to provide a guarantee of as much as $105 billion to support OpenAI’s lease of a large Ohio data center being developed by SoftBank-owned SB Energy.
It will also invest another $1.5 billion in SB Energy, following a $1 billion investment earlier this year from OpenAI and SoftBank.
The scale matters.
Nvidia is no longer only selling the accelerators going into AI data centers. It is increasingly using its own balance sheet to help customers finance the infrastructure required to deploy them.
That effectively adds another source of capital to the AI buildout: the supplier itself.
The CapEx may ultimately sit elsewhere, but Nvidia is helping make that CapEx financeable.
Anthropic: $10bn+ Revolver, $15bn Data Center Financing, IPO Ahead
Anthropic’s revolving credit facility is set to rise above $10 billion, compared with the $2.5 billion five-year facility it secured last year.
The revolver is not direct data center CapEx. It is primarily a corporate liquidity facility and also reflects Anthropic’s preparations for a potential IPO.
But it sits alongside a much larger infrastructure financing effort.
Banks led by Morgan Stanley have been working on roughly $15 billion of debt financing for an Anthropic data center project in Texas, reportedly supported by Google.
That package has been described as including a $14 billion bridge loan and a revolving facility.
Anthropic has also filed confidentially for an IPO and could reach the public market as soon as this fall.
Its annualized revenue run rate reached more than $65 billion by the end of July, according to Bloomberg, while preliminary quarterly revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, versus $787 million a year earlier.
The financing logic is increasingly clear.
More revenue supports more debt capacity. More debt capacity supports more infrastructure. An IPO could add another major source of capital on top.
Anthropic is therefore building both a compute stack and a capital stack capable of funding it.
Dell’Oro: From $1tn to More Than $3tn
The industry-level numbers are moving even faster.
Dell’Oro Group has repeatedly raised its outlook for global data center CapEx as hyperscaler and AI infrastructure spending continues to exceed earlier expectations.
| Forecast published | Data center CapEx outlook |
|---|---|
| Feb. 2025 | >$1tn by 2029 |
| Aug. 2025 | $1.2tn by 2029 |
| Feb. 2026 | $1.7tn by 2030 |
| Aug. 2026 | >$3tn by 2030 |
In February 2025, Dell’Oro expected annual worldwide data center CapEx to exceed $1 trillion by 2029.
Six months later, the estimate moved to $1.2 trillion.
By February 2026, Dell’Oro was forecasting $1.7 trillion by 2030.
Now that figure is above $3 trillion.
That means the 2030 outlook has increased by roughly 76% in about six months.
The latest revision reflects higher hyperscaler CapEx guidance, larger estimates for global data center power capacity and higher commodity costs.
High-end accelerators are expected to remain the single largest component of spending.
But the buildout is increasingly spreading across the rest of the stack: servers, networking, storage, power distribution, cooling and physical data center capacity.
Dell’Oro also expects the Top 4 US hyperscalers to account for about half of global data center CapEx.
AI-specialized cloud providers — including model developers and neoclouds — are expected to grow at a nearly 60% CAGR through 2030.
The implication is that AI infrastructure is becoming less of a GPU story and more of a full-stack capital cycle.
Source:
- Reuters; https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nvidia-invest-15-billion-sb-energy-under-openai-data-center-deal-2026-08-17/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
- Bloomberg; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-18/anthropic-pre-ipo-credit-facility-set-to-climb-past-10-billion
- Dell'Oro; https://www.delloro.com/news/ai-buildout-maintains-momentum-as-data-center-capex-surpasses-3-trillion-by-2030/
