Nvidia guarantees financing of up to 105 billion dollars for a new data center that OpenAI wants to operate in Ohio. Additionally, the chip manufacturer is directly investing 1.5 billion dollars in the project developer SB Energy. The facility is being built on the site of a decommissioned uranium enrichment plant and is expected to ultimately deliver eight gigawatts of computing power.
Data center being built on former nuclear facility site
The location is the former uranium enrichment plant Portsmouth in Pike County, Ohio, as reported by WOSU. From 1954 to 2001, the facility supplied enriched uranium for the U.S. nuclear weapons program and civilian reactors. SB Energy, a subsidiary of Japan’s SoftBank Group, will build, own, and operate the new data center on the same site and lease it exclusively to OpenAI for 20 years, as confirmed by Nvidia in a separate statement. The first expansion phase with 4.25 gigawatts of computing power is expected to go online in 2028, with an optional expansion of an additional 3.75 gigawatts to a total of eight gigawatts. Eight gigawatts is in the range of the electricity needs of several million households. For cooling, the project relies on a closed water system with air cooling instead of traditional evaporative cooling towers; the ongoing water consumption is expected to later match that of an ordinary office building. Only Nvidia chips are to run on the entire site, securing the company a long-term major customer for its new DSX platform.
Nvidia takes on role as financing partner
Bloomberg and CNBC report consistently that Nvidia guarantees financing of up to 105 billion dollars for the project – unverified independently, as neither Nvidia nor OpenAI specify this total amount in their own statements. However, the direct involvement is confirmed: Nvidia is investing 1.5 billion dollars in SB Energy, joining SoftBank and OpenAI as a capital provider. SB Energy and SoftBank also announce at least 4.2 billion dollars for regional power grid expansion in collaboration with the grid operator AEP Ohio. For the local community, SB Energy and OpenAI are each providing 40 million dollars, totaling 80 million dollars. OpenAI adds up to 84 million dollars in Codex credits for around 844,000 students and trainees in Ohio for the 2026/2027 academic year. The project is expected to create around 35,000 construction jobs by 2032, with 2,500 positions remaining for ongoing operations, according to the participants. This is intended to explicitly address local concerns about the enormous electricity and land requirements of the project.
Critics warn of circular financing
The deal is part of a series of similar financing agreements: Just on August 10, Nvidia announced a platform of 500 billion dollars for AI data centers with six financial firms, where its own chips serve as collateral. Back in July, it emerged that Nvidia holds 9.3 percent in AI cloud provider Nebius – one of several stakes in its own major customers. Just a few weeks earlier, Amazon completed its 50 billion dollar investment in OpenAI. Critics accuse Nvidia of artificially supporting its own customers through so-called circular financing, so that they in turn buy Nvidia hardware. CEO Jensen Huang rejects the accusation according to Benzinga and instead sees a market opportunity of 600 billion dollars for computing power overall. At the start of the partnership, Huang stated according to Nvidia that artificial intelligence would become “the infrastructure – the foundation for intelligence in every industry.” Competitor Anthropic has also recently completed several billion-dollar data center deals, including with investors Macquarie and GIC. The race for computing capacity is thus driving the entire industry, not just Nvidia and OpenAI. For investors, the announcement serves as further evidence of how much the AI boom now depends on a few closely intertwined large contracts.
It will be crucial whether the credit-based structure holds up if the demand for AI computing power grows more slowly than planned. The first 800 megawatts from Pike County are expected to go online in 2028 – until then, it remains unclear how many of the further financing commitments from Nvidia’s series of data center deals will actually be called upon.
