Nvidia has become something of a central bank for companies expanding the market for its chips beyond tech giants, backstopping customers and demand. But as Nvidia-backed cloud firms come under pressure, the question is how much further it will go.

The chipmaker has already disclosed as much as $164.5 billion in guarantees and other commitments to support new data centers, including agreements to pay landlords if tenants default on leases and promises to buy capacity, filings show, as of the company’s July quarter. That’s on top of more than $7 billion it has invested or agreed to invest directly in AI cloud providers.

Local government resistance to data center development accelerated this summer, a warning sign for big AI companies such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that are pinning their compute ambitions on data center expansion.

In July alone, more than 150 towns and counties passed temporary or permanent bans on data centers, many adopted in emergency meetings. That brings the nationwide total to more than 500 active data center bans at the start of August, according to The Information’s analysis of thousands of legal documents and local news reports. When we first published our tracker of these bans in late June, we had found more than 300.