Nvidia to Provide $105 Billion in Financing for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center

PIKE COUNTY, Ohio —

Nvidia said Monday it will provide up to $105 billion in financing to help build a massive OpenAI data center in Pike County, Ohio, according to a securities filing. The deal makes Nvidia the exclusive supplier of computing chips for the site, TechCrunch and the South China Morning Post reported.

SB Energy, a developer backed by SoftBank, will build and run the facility on a 20-year lease to OpenAI. The campus sits on federal land once home to the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which enriched uranium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and Navy submarines during the Cold War, according to TechCrunch and a Department of Energy fact sheet. Nvidia is also investing $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy.

The financing will support an initial 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with an option to add 3.75 gigawatts more, CNBC reported. Nvidia said the first phase of compute is expected online in 2028. The South China Morning Post put the facility's eventual total capacity at up to 8 gigawatts.

Power Costs and Circular Financing Questions

SB Energy and SoftBank plan to build power sources supporting 10 gigawatts of energy, including at least 9.2 gigawatts of natural gas generation, and will invest at least $4.2 billion in regional grid upgrades with utility AEP Ohio, according to the Department of Energy. The agency said SB Energy will also pay for accelerated cleanup of the Portsmouth site and has committed $40 million to a community benefits agreement for surrounding towns.

TechCrunch reported the natural gas plant alone is expected to cost $33 billion, reflecting a 66 percent rise in gas plant construction costs over the past two years, according to data from BloombergNEF. TechCrunch also reported that once the plant and similar projects nationwide are finished, they could compete with export markets for natural gas, a dynamic that could triple gas prices in some parts of the country.

The deal is the latest in a series of financing arrangements Nvidia has struck to support AI infrastructure buildouts, arrangements that have drawn scrutiny over so-called circular financing, in which a chipmaker helps fund the very companies that buy its chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the South China Morning Post the arrangement is not circular financing and said the company is using "its scale and long-term visibility" to help. In a company statement, Huang said Nvidia is "securing long-lived infrastructure for Nvidia compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories that can be upgraded repeatedly with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics."

Jobs and Broader Buildout

OpenAI said the project will support 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 long-term positions, CNBC reported. The Department of Energy's estimate differs, citing more than 10,000 construction jobs over four years and more than 2,000 operational jobs, plus tens of thousands of indirect jobs regionally.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC that computing capacity has become essential to the industry. "Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age," he said. CNBC had previously reported Nvidia was weighing a backstop of up to $250 billion for a larger, 10-gigawatt version of the project, before the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the guarantee would shrink to under $120 billion.