OpenAI is in talks with SoftBank's SB Energy to long-term lease a proposed 10-gigawatt AI data center campus on federal land in Pike County, southern Ohio. If fully built, the campus would cost at least $500 billion. The key part of the deal: Nvidia is discussing using its massive balance sheet to provide a credit backstop for OpenAI's lease and for future project financing from SB Energy. If an agreement is reached, it would be OpenAI's largest infrastructure commitment to date, and the first time Nvidia has played the role of de facto infrastructure financial guarantor on such a scale.
The site was formerly a uranium enrichment facility for nuclear weapons materials under the U.S. Department of Energy. Developer SB Energy was founded in 2019 and is controlled by SoftBank Group, with Ares Management and OpenAI also as shareholders (OpenAI invested $1 billion in January and hired SB Energy to build its 1.2 GW Milam County data center in Texas). Under a Trump-era trade policy agreement with Japan announced by the Commerce Department in February, SB Energy will invest $33 billion to build a 9.2 GW natural gas power plant on the site, owned by the U.S. government and operated by SB Energy, which will also fund grid upgrades. In March, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright attended the project's groundbreaking ceremony.
The 10 GW project is about 4.5 times the generating capacity of the Hoover Dam. Its first phase of 800 megawatts is expected to come online in 2028. Under the 20-year lease, OpenAI will control the equipment inside the facility and assume rent payments once it's operational, with total rent expected to be tens of billions of dollars. Additionally, since IT equipment like chips and servers typically accounts for about 70% of data center costs, OpenAI will need around $350 billion to buy Nvidia's AI chips. It's reportedly already discussing how to raise that money. Google has used a similar model, providing debt and rent guarantees for Anthropic's TPU data center leases.
The backdrop is OpenAI's hunger for control over compute infrastructure. Earlier this year, its planned $500 billion "Stargate" joint venture with Oracle and SoftBank fell apart, and OpenAI shelved plans to build its own data centers in the near term. This deal with SB Energy signals it's pursuing its vast infrastructure ambitions in a piecemeal fashion. Meanwhile, on Monday (June 8), OpenAI confidentially filed its IPO prospectus, and its cloud leasing agreements with Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon AWS — worth at least $665 billion over five years — are expected to be a focus of the listing review. SB Energy also announced plans in May to go public in the U.S., with a valuation potentially exceeding $50 billion.