OpenAI signed a lease Monday for a multi-gigawatt data-center campus in Ohio backed by Nvidia and SB Energy [1], [2].
The deal secures the massive compute capacity required to train and run next-generation AI models while ensuring Nvidia has a primary customer for its hardware.
Nvidia has pledged up to $105 billion [1] in financing for the project. The campus will be located at the Ports-Pike mega-data-center site in the U.S. [4], [5]. While OpenAI manages the lease, SB Energy will provide the necessary land, power, and shell capacity to support the infrastructure [1].
Reports on the total power capacity of the facility vary. DataCenterDynamics reported that Nvidia will back 4.25 GW of capacity for OpenAI [6]. However, Digitimes reported that OpenAI is nearing a lease for 10 GW [7].
The partnership creates a vertical pipeline for AI development. OpenAI gains the physical infrastructure needed for scale, and Nvidia secures a guaranteed market for its chips [3], [5]. The arrangement allows OpenAI to expand its operational footprint without bearing the full immediate financial burden of construction, and power acquisition.
The Ohio site is designed to be one of the largest AI hubs in the world. By partnering with SB Energy, the companies aim to solve the primary bottleneck for AI expansion—the availability of industrial-scale electricity and land [1].
“Nvidia has pledged up to $105 billion in financing for the project.”
This partnership signals a shift toward deeply integrated financial and technical alliances in the AI industry. By providing the financing and the hardware, Nvidia is effectively underwriting its own demand, while OpenAI bypasses traditional infrastructure hurdles to maintain its lead in model development. The scale of the Ohio site suggests that the compute requirements for future AI iterations are growing faster than existing public cloud infrastructure can support.
