OpenAI's 20-year Ohio lease, backed by Nvidia's $105B guarantee, could hit 8 GW — bigger than San Francisco's 2024 power use. Altman says the site will serve "millions of people."
OpenAI will lease a massive new U.S. data centre for 20 years, backed by a $105 billion financing commitment from Nvidia, according to a regulatory filing published Monday. The project, built on a former Cold War-era uranium enrichment plant site in Ohio, could eventually reach 8 gigawatts of capacity – enough to make it the single largest known AI data centre. The facility will run exclusively on Nvidia chips.
SoftBank and SB Energy, the subsidiary that owns the site, will invest more than $4 billion into local energy infrastructure and build at least 10 GW of new generation to power it. OpenAI will contribute $40 million to local priorities. Nvidia is also putting $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy, though the company preemptively pushed back on criticism that the arrangement amounts to circular financing – a pattern that has fueled fears of an AI bubble.
“OpenAI will pay the lease,” Nvidia wrote in a blog post Monday, adding that the deal was made with “the same discipline we apply to supply-chain management.”
Despite explosive revenue growth, AI developers still depend on financial backing from their own suppliers to build the infrastructure underpinning the technology. Nvidia’s financing guarantee, its largest yet, marks a step change in scale for a practice that has become common in the sector. The company previously considered providing a backstop of $250 billion, according to reports in July from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. Nvidia shares fell 5% after those reports surfaced, though they remain up more than 19% this year.
Why Ohio, and why now
The site’s initial capacity will be 4.25 GW, with room to add another 3.75 GW. For context, a nuclear power plant typically provides around 1 GW. The entire city of San Francisco consumed just over 5 GW in 2024, according to state data.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement: “This is going to be a huge site, with enough computing power to help millions of people use AI to do things we can only start to imagine today.”
The project is expected to create 35,000 temporary construction jobs over six years and 2,500 long-term operating roles, OpenAI said. Those promises about jobs and energy investments are a direct response to growing public hostility toward data centres, which require heavy amounts of electricity and water. More than 70% of Americans oppose building data centres near their homes, according to a March Gallup poll. Rising electricity bills, attributed in part to these sites, are fueling debate in the midterm elections.
OpenAI and SB Energy maintain they will cover the data centre’s energy and infrastructure costs without passing them on to local residents.
How this compares to Stargate and Musk
Last year, OpenAI, Nvidia and SoftBank – alongside other partners including Oracle – announced a $500 billion, multiyear data centre project called Stargate, with a goal of 10 GW across multiple sites. Half of that capacity is being built in the UAE.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which now owns his AI subsidiary SpaceXAI, operates 1 GW of capacity at its Colossus data centres across Tennessee and Mississippi. Meta has a 5 GW project underway in Louisiana.
For Nvidia, the Ohio commitment pushes its role beyond chip supplier and into infrastructure backer – a position that carries financial risk but also locks in demand for its hardware at a scale no competitor can match. For OpenAI, the lease locks in computing capacity through 2046, a hedge against the kind of supply constraints that have periodically slowed model development.
NVDA stock page opens with a 78 Alpha Score, labelled Strong, at $225.01. The stock was flat on the session Monday. Any near-term move likely depends on whether investors see the $105 billion guarantee as a sign of locked-in demand or a concentration of counterparty risk.
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