OpenAI and NVIDIA back $105 billion, 8-gigawatt PORTS-Pike data center in Ohio

OpenAI has agreed to lease roughly 8 gigawatts of data center capacity at a new campus in Pike County, Ohio, with NVIDIA committing up to $105 billion in financing support and agreeing to supply the site exclusively with its AI compute hardware — one of the largest single AI infrastructure commitments announced to date.

What's new

In its own announcement, OpenAI states: "OpenAI has entered into an agreement to secure approximately 8 gigawatts-IT at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, working with SB Energy, NVIDIA, and the U.S. Department of Energy."

Key details from the announcement:

• Financing: NVIDIA will invest $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer building and operating the site, and "will provide credit support for the land, power, and shell buildout associated with the initial 4.25 IT-GW" — reported elsewhere as a guarantee worth up to $105 billion across defined lease and power payments.
• Hardware exclusivity: "the data center will exclusively host NVIDIA AI compute infrastructure."
• Timeline: "The first 800 megawatts are expected to become available in 2028 largely using existing AEP infrastructure," with the full buildout continuing over roughly six years.
• Jobs: the project is expected to create "35,000 construction jobs during its six-year buildout through 2032 and 2,500 long-term operating jobs."
• Community commitments: OpenAI says it "will invest an additional $40 million" in the region on top of SB Energy's own $40 million community agreement, plus "$84 million in Codex credits through ChatGPT" for Ohio students.
• Environmental design: the facility will use "closed-loop, air-cooled cooling systems that recirculate water rather than relying on cooling towers" that continuously consume water.
• Named partners include SB Energy, NVIDIA, the U.S. Department of Energy, North America's Building Trades Unions, and the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council.

Context

The deal is the latest and largest in a run of NVIDIA-backed AI infrastructure financing announcements this month — NVIDIA has separately said it's lining up roughly $500 billion in financing partnerships with Wall Street firms to fund AI data center buildouts, and reporting has tracked several rounds of negotiation over the scope of NVIDIA's OpenAI infrastructure backing (early figures reported as high as $250 billion before settling into this $105 billion structure). SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary building the PORTS-Pike campus, has become one of the primary vehicles through which OpenAI is securing power and compute capacity outside its existing Stargate joint venture with Oracle and SoftBank.

The Pike County site itself carries some symbolic weight: it sits on land historically used for uranium enrichment, now being repurposed for AI-scale compute — part of a broader pattern of AI data centers landing in traditionally industrial or energy-infrastructure-heavy regions of the US that have the grid capacity and workforce to support them.

Why it matters

The scale of the financial commitment — up to $105 billion in guarantees on a single campus, with NVIDIA locking in exclusivity as the hardware supplier — illustrates just how capital-intensive frontier AI has become and how deeply NVIDIA is now embedding itself as a financier of its own customers' infrastructure, not just a chip vendor. That structure lets OpenAI secure compute capacity without fronting the full capital cost itself, while giving NVIDIA a guaranteed, long-term buyer locked in years ahead of the hardware actually shipping.

It also raises the broader question that's followed every recent OpenAI infrastructure deal: who ultimately bears the risk if AI demand growth doesn't match the pace of this buildout. OpenAI has separately told public officials, including in a letter to the Governor of Texas, that it will fund its own infrastructure costs — a commitment this Ohio deal's financing structure will test at a scale few companies have ever attempted.