OpenAI locks down an 8GW mega-campus in Ohio

AI labs used to fight over GPUs. Now they're fighting over gigawatts and taking over cold war nuclear facilities.

On Monday, OpenAI inked an agreement to secure roughly 8 gigawatts of compute capacity at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio. The massive buildout runs through 2032 in partnership with SB Energy, NVIDIA, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The project is expected to create 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 permanent operating roles, with an initial 800 megawatts coming online in 2028.

A $33B gas plant on a uranium enrichment site

The campus sits on land once used to enrich uranium for America's nuclear arsenal and Navy submarines. To feed the data center's insatiable appetite, SB Energy plans to construct an onsite 9.2-gigawatt natural gas power plant.

That power plant alone is slated to cost $33 billion, reflecting a 66% spike in gas plant construction costs over the past two years, according to BloombergNEF. Once running, the site could be competing with export terminals for fuel, potentially driving up regional gas prices.

NVIDIA is anchoring the entire operation. Beyond investing $1.5 billion directly into SB Energy, SEC filings reveal NVIDIA is offering up to $105 billion in credit support for the initial 4.25 GW buildout. In exchange, the site will exclusively host NVIDIA hardware.

To keep local backlash at bay, the facility will use closed-loop, air-cooled systems that recirculate water rather than relying on evaporative towers. OpenAI and SB Energy are also chipping in $80 million in community grants, alongside $84 million in ChatGPT Codex credits for roughly 844,000 Ohio college students.

OpenAI operates purely as a tenant under a 20-year lease, only paying for capacity as it goes live.

Why it matters

For everyday developers and businesses, this capacity won't hit today, but by 2028 it will dictate whether frontier models keep getting exponentially smarter or hit an infrastructure wall.

This deal fundamentally redraws the frontier AI race. We've moved past securing chip allocations; leading labs now have to coordinate sovereign-scale power grids and fuel supply chains. With 8 gigawatts of capacity, this single site rivals the output of multiple commercial nuclear reactors.

From a corporate structuring standpoint, it looks brilliant. NVIDIA leverages its immense balance sheet to guarantee hardware exclusivity, while OpenAI locks in decade-long capacity without carrying construction debt. Yet the vulnerabilities are obvious. Relying on a massive fossil-fuel plant clashes directly with Silicon Valley clean-energy pledges, and passing escalating natural gas costs down the pipeline could make future token inference much harder to cheapen.