OpenAI is in talks to lease a 10-gigawatt Ohio data center campus, a project that could cost over $500 billion. The deal, potentially backed by Nvidia, would see the chipmaker supply hardware and guarantee financing for the 20-year lease. The campus will be developed by SB Energy on federal land at a former nuclear site. This deepens the OpenAI-Nvidia partnership and highlights a trend of long-term AI infrastructure deals.
OpenAI Ohio data center lease
- ▪The proposed Ohio data center campus could cost at least $500 billion to build based on current prices
- ▪Under the proposed deal, OpenAI would control the computing equipment through a 20-year lease
- ▪OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease a proposed 10-gigawatt data center campus in southern Ohio
- ▪OpenAI's lease payments would begin once the site starts operating, with the first phase expected in 2028
Nvidia financial guarantee structure
- ▪Nvidia is expected to provide a financial guarantee for both OpenAI's lease obligations and the developer's financing
- ▪The potential deal includes financial backing from Nvidia, which is also expected to supply the facility's hardware
Portsmouth plant redevelopment partnership
- ▪The proposed campus would be located on U.S. Department of Energy land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio
- ▪The facility would be developed by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group
- ▪SB Energy has committed to building 10 gigawatts of new power generation for the site, including at least 9.2 gigawatts from natural gas
- ▪Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said a U.S. tariff deal helped lure SB Energy to invest in Ohio as part of a $550 billion commitment from Japan
Enterprise AI vendor lock-in risks
- ▪Analyst Sanchit Vir Gogia stated the potential deal makes the relationship a "sponsor and a tenant" rather than "vendor and customer."
- ▪Analyst Neil Shah advised CIOs to negotiate for infrastructure flexibility to avoid overdependence on a single compute ecosystem like Nvidia's
AI infrastructure financing models
- ▪The deal structure highlights a trend of long-term partnerships between AI model developers, chip suppliers, and energy providers to secure compute capacity
- ▪In September 2025, OpenAI and Nvidia announced a partnership for Nvidia to supply at least 10 gigawatts of its systems to OpenAI
- ▪As part of the September 2025 deal, Nvidia intended to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as each gigawatt of capacity came online
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