What moved
On 17 August Nvidia disclosed residual value guarantees capped at $105bn over OpenAI’s leases at SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio, ending after 20 years or earlier if OpenAI reaches a satisfactory credit rating. Nvidia’s announcement names no fee. It names exclusivity: Nvidia becomes the campus’s sole AI compute provider. Meta backed the $27.3bn Hyperion data centre financing with a similar guarantee. The FT counts up to $300bn of these commitments in twelve months.
Why it matters for pricing
These guarantees have real value. They turn a long-dated, obsolescence-exposed asset into debt that investment-grade buyers will hold. At arm’s length the guarantor is paid for that. Here it is paid in kind — hardware sales, exclusive supply, a data centre financed off its own balance sheet. That is legitimate: the guidelines allow closely linked transactions to be priced together.
The difficulty is the price. What is exclusivity at a campus coming online from 2028 worth, in basis points, on $105bn of contingent exposure? There is no quote today. There will not be one in 20 years either, because answering it means knowing what OpenAI would have bought without the clause.
The intragroup version is everywhere. A parent guarantees a subsidiary’s facility, and the subsidiary buys the parent’s products or builds capacity for the group. No fee is charged because the return is “in the relationship”. A yield calculation on the guarantee is the easy half. Showing where the guarantor’s return sits, and that it is roughly enough, is the half files skip — and it is specialist work.
Tax authorities are closing the room to skip it. Chapter X has set the standard for guarantees across OECD-aligned jurisdictions since 2020, and the UK is the latest major economy to write it into law. Finance Act 2026 ties UK transfer pricing to the 2022 Guidelines and takes guarantees and implicit support into account in the arm’s length rate — for new borrowing from 1 January 2026, and all borrowing from 2028.
Our call. Guarantee disputes move from “what rate?” to “where was the guarantor paid?” over the next three years, wherever Chapter X is applied — with the UK first.
What this means for your business
- Find the guarantor’s return, and evidence it. Where a guarantee carries no fee, record at inception what the guarantor receives instead, and show it meets the borrower’s benefit.
- Tie the fee to the support. Build in a review when the borrower’s standalone rating improves. A guarantee worth less should cost less.
- Know which rules bite where you borrow. In the UK, borrowing from 1 January 2026 is already inside the new regime; existing facilities follow from 2028.
- Bring the specialist in at structuring. Valuing a guarantee paid in kind is modelling work, not a rate lookup — and it is exactly the work ajiho is built for.
Sources
Nvidia Form 8-K and press release, 17 August 2026. S&P Global Ratings, Beignet Investor LLC. Finance Act 2026, Schedule 6. OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines 2022, Chapters I–III and X. The $300bn figure is a Financial Times analysis, 20 September 2026; no FT text or charts reproduced. As at 21 September 2026.