NVIDIA backs $105B OpenAI Ohio data center

NVIDIA is providing up to $105 billion in financing for a new OpenAI data center at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, a 3,700-acre former uranium-enrichment site. SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, will build and own the facility under a 20-year lease to OpenAI, while NVIDIA becomes the site’s exclusive AI-compute infrastructure provider. NVIDIA is separately putting $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy to fund the buildout.

The financing covers an initial 4.25 gigawatts of IT capacity, with an option to add another 3.75 gigawatts, for a planned total of 8 gigawatts. Capacity starts coming online in phases beginning in 2028. For scale, that would exceed the roughly 4.66-gigawatt total output of Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear plant, the largest US nuclear facility. At least $4.2 billion is earmarked for regional grid infrastructure, and OpenAI and SB Energy are jointly funding a community benefits pool starting at $120 million, plus up to $84 million in Codex credits for roughly 844,000 Ohio students during the 2026-2027 academic year.

What it means for operators

It fits a broader pattern of AI compute capacity consolidating under a small number of infrastructure consortiums and financing partners, like the $40B Aligned Data Centers deal closed by BlackRock’s GIP, MGX, and an NVIDIA/Microsoft-backed group last month. Rather than just selling GPUs, NVIDIA is now underwriting the buildings that will hold them, which locks in years of future demand and shifts real credit risk onto NVIDIA’s own balance sheet if OpenAI’s usage ever falls short of the buildout. If you’re planning multi-year compute commitments with any single vendor, this structure is worth watching: it means the financing side of a deal, not just the sticker price, increasingly decides whose infrastructure gets built next.