Nvidia Backs $105 Billion OpenAI Ohio Data Center Deal

Nvidia just agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion so OpenAI can build a data center on a decommissioned Cold War uranium enrichment site in rural Ohio — and the fine print says Nvidia’s own chips are the only hardware allowed inside it. The deal, announced August 17, 2026, is the latest and arguably strangest entry in a year of AI infrastructure mega-deals: a chipmaker financing the building that will house the machines it sells, leased by the company that’s promised to buy them.

I’ve been tracking these AI infrastructure announcements since SK Hynix’s Nasdaq listing back in July, and this one stands out even by 2026 standards. It’s not a chip fab, and it’s not a GPU order — it’s Nvidia acting like a bank, a landlord, and a supplier all at once, for a single 20-year lease in Pike County, Ohio.

What’s actually being built

The project is called the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, and its location is one of those details that makes the story more interesting than the balance sheet: it sits on land once used by the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era U.S. Department of Energy facility that enriched uranium. That site has been decommissioned for years, and now it’s being repurposed for the opposite kind of energy problem — not splitting atoms, but powering GPUs.

SB Energy, the developer behind the project (and a Stargate partner previously backed by OpenAI and SoftBank), will build and own the campus. OpenAI signs on as the tenant under a 20-year lease. Nvidia’s role is to guarantee the financing that gets the site built: land, power infrastructure, and the building shell, backed by up to $105 billion in credit support, plus a direct $1.5 billion equity investment in SB Energy itself.

Some earlier reporting pegged the potential chip deployment at roughly 1.5 million Nvidia GPUs, which the company has said could represent $150–200 billion in revenue per hardware generation through 2030 if the site is built out to its full 8-gigawatt ceiling. Nothing about that capacity arrives quickly, though — the first phase isn’t expected online until 2028, which is an eternity in AI-hardware years.

The circular financing question nobody can quite dodge

Here’s the part that’s drawing the most scrutiny, and it’s worth being upfront about it rather than burying it: SoftBank sold its entire $5.8 billion Nvidia stake back in November 2025 specifically to fund AI infrastructure investments — and SB Energy, the company Nvidia is now bankrolling, is a SoftBank-linked Stargate partner. So the sequence looks like: SoftBank cashes out of Nvidia stock, uses the money to help build data centers, and Nvidia turns around and guarantees the financing for those same data centers on the condition that only Nvidia chips go inside them.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back on the “circular financing” framing directly, comparing it to ordinary supply-chain management: “This is the same discipline we apply to supply-chain management: we secure critical inputs when we have visibility into customer demand,” he said, adding that Nvidia “will only pay for portions of lease and power payments, not the full cost of the site.” In other words, Nvidia isn’t funding the whole build — just enough of it to make sure the site gets built and gets built exclusively around Nvidia hardware.

Whether that distinction satisfies skeptics is a separate question. It’s the same basic structure that’s now shown up across Nvidia’s dealings with OpenAI, CoreWeave, and several other AI infrastructure players this year: the chip supplier increasingly functions as the financier of its own demand. Analysts have flagged the pattern before on Tesla and SpaceX’s Terafab chip plant and other big infrastructure bets this year — when the biggest customer in an industry is also underwriting the industry’s expansion, it gets harder to separate genuine demand from demand that only exists because the money was made available.

Real infrastructure costs, and a community payout

Beyond the Nvidia-OpenAI dynamic, the numbers around the physical build are genuinely large on their own. Reporting from TechCrunch pegs an associated 9.2-gigawatt natural gas power plant for the site at roughly $33 billion — reflecting what one report described as a 66% jump in natural gas power plant construction costs over the past two years, largely because every hyperscaler and AI developer in the country is trying to build gas peaker plants at the same time. That kind of demand spike is also raising fears that AI data center buildout could push natural gas prices sharply higher in regions where several large sites compete for the same supply.

SB Energy and OpenAI are also funding an $80 million community benefits package for Pike County — split between an original $40 million commitment from SB Energy/SoftBank and a further $40 million added by OpenAI — plus a separate $4.2 billion investment in regional grid infrastructure. SB Energy co-CEO Rich Hossfeld framed the project around ratepayer protection and local jobs, saying the infrastructure investment is “vital for the AI economy” while “protecting ratepayers, creating tens of thousands” of jobs regionally.

Sam Altman leaned into the same local-revival framing in his own statement, saying OpenAI is “proud to build it in Pike County, a place that is once again at the heart of American industry” — a nod to the site’s history as a major Cold War-era federal employer before the Portsmouth plant wound down.

Why this matters beyond one Ohio campus

Zoom out and this deal is really a data point in a much bigger pattern I’ve been writing about all year: AI compute demand has outgrown the normal build-it-and-they-will-come model of data center development, so the chipmakers themselves are now underwriting the real estate and power infrastructure needed to house their own products. Nvidia isn’t just selling GPUs anymore — it’s guaranteeing leases, taking equity stakes in developers, and locking in exclusivity clauses that keep rivals like AMD or custom silicon out of entire campuses before a single rack is installed.

That’s a meaningfully different business than the one Nvidia was running three years ago, and it comes with different risks: credit exposure to a build that doesn’t come online until 2028, dependence on natural gas markets that are already getting squeezed by competing data center projects, and a financing structure that critics will keep calling circular no matter how Huang frames it. For OpenAI, it means another 20-year infrastructure commitment stacked on top of the company’s existing Stargate and Ohio-adjacent projects — a lot of runway bet on continued, compounding demand for the models it’s selling.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much is Nvidia actually spending on the OpenAI Ohio data center?

Nvidia is guaranteeing up to $105 billion in financing for land, power, and the building shell at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, plus a separate $1.5 billion direct equity investment in developer SB Energy. Nvidia has said it will only cover portions of the lease and power payments, not the site’s full cost.

Where is the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus located?

In Pike County, Ohio, on the site of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a decommissioned U.S. Department of Energy uranium enrichment facility from the Cold War era.

When will the data center actually come online?

Capacity is expected to arrive in phases starting in 2028, beginning with an initial 4.25 gigawatts, with an option to expand to 8 gigawatts total.

What is “circular financing” and why are people worried about it?

It refers to Nvidia financing infrastructure for a customer (OpenAI, via developer SB Energy) that will then be built exclusively with Nvidia’s own chips — meaning Nvidia is effectively funding demand for its own products. SoftBank selling its Nvidia stake in late 2025 to help fund AI infrastructure investments, including SB Energy projects, adds to the perception of a closed loop. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has defended it as ordinary supply-chain planning rather than artificial demand creation.

Is OpenAI buying the data center outright?

No — SB Energy will build and own the campus, and OpenAI is leasing it under a 20-year agreement as the tenant.