OpenAI signs 20-year lease for an 8GW Ohio data centre

OpenAI signed a 20-year lease for a data-centre campus in Pike County, Ohio, that Nvidia said would be built to exclusively host Nvidia AI infrastructure. Under the arrangement, SoftBank’s SB Energy will build, own and operate the site — called the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, after the decommissioned uranium-enrichment plant on the land — rather than OpenAI or Nvidia holding it directly.

Nvidia’s announcement put an initial 4.25 IT-gigawatts of capacity online from 2028, with an option to add a further 3.75 IT-GW — the roughly 8 IT-GW the deal is generally described by. SoftBank committed to building at least 10 gigawatts of new power generation to support that load and to investing at least $4.2 billion in regional grid infrastructure through a partnership with the utility AEP Ohio.

Nvidia’s own financial commitment was an equity investment of $1.5 billion in SB Energy plus what the company described only as credit support for land, power and shell buildout, without a headline figure. CNBC reported, citing a securities filing, that the credit support could total up to $105 billion — lower, it noted, than a $250 billion backstop Nvidia had reportedly been discussing with OpenAI for a larger, 10-gigawatt site. Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said the company’s chips had become “vital in the age of AI,” while OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman called the planned campus large enough to “help millions of people use AI to do things we can only start to imagine today.”

The structure — a third party building and owning the physical site, Nvidia financing the buildout of its own customer base rather than paying for compute outright — continues a pattern also visible in Nvidia’s $500 billion Wall Street financing platforms announced a week earlier, and it fed the same investor debate about circular financing arrangements between Nvidia and the AI labs and data-centre operators it backs.