Nvidia has formally agreed to back OpenAI's massive data center build-out in Pike County, Ohio, with a guarantee worth as much as $105 billion, converting months of reported negotiations into one of the largest financing commitments in the history of the AI industry. Reuters reported that the chipmaker will provide up to the nine-figure guarantee for the facility, while CNBC described the arrangement as $105 billion in financing backing the project. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both confirmed the deal on Monday.
The announcement, published Monday on Nvidia's official newsroom, details an arrangement in which Nvidia secures land, power and shell capacity through a partnership with SB Energy at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Piketon, Ohio. OpenAI will be the customer, while SB Energy — a data center developer backed by SoftBank Group — will build, own and operate the facility under a 20-year lease to OpenAI. For readers tracking the latest AI developments, the deal resolves weeks of speculation about how the project would ultimately be structured.
A Deal Months in the Making
The Ohio project has been the subject of escalating reports since late July, when Nvidia was said to be in talks to back a $250 billion data center build-out for OpenAI. Earlier this month, reports emerged that Nvidia had cut the proposed guarantee from $250 billion to under $120 billion, and on Saturday the company was reported to be negotiating a multi-billion-dollar stake in SB Energy to anchor the arrangement.
The final agreement lands at $105 billion and includes a direct equity investment: Nvidia said it will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, joining existing investors SoftBank Group and OpenAI. Nvidia also announced a related financing platform with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR intended to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure.
What the Campus Will Actually Do
According to Nvidia's announcement, the initial deployment at PORTS-Pike is designed to support 4.25 gigawatts of IT capacity for AI factories, with Nvidia holding an option to extend capacity beyond that initial figure. The facility will run Nvidia's full-stack DSX AI factory platform, encompassing GPUs, CPUs and networking, with resiliency engineered across facilities, hardware and software together.
Capacity is expected to come online in phases beginning in 2028. SB Energy and SoftBank plan to build at least 10 gigawatts of new energy generation to support the campus — enough for 8 gigawatts of AI factory capacity — and to invest at least $4.2 billion in new regional grid infrastructure through a partnership with AEP Ohio designed to protect ratepayers.
The site itself carries deep historical resonance. The campus is reindustrializing the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a former federal uranium enrichment facility in Appalachian Ohio, in collaboration with AEP Ohio, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Executives Frame the Stakes
"AI is becoming infrastructure — the foundation for intelligence in every industry — and land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI," Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO, said in the announcement. "We are 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."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized the scale of the undertaking. "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, from finding new medicines to starting businesses and solving hard problems," Altman said, adding that OpenAI wants Pike County residents to benefit through jobs and community investment.
SB Energy co-CEO Rich Hossfeld said the company is "building power-first infrastructure at unprecedented scale," while SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said the partnership would "help unlock the power of AGI and move humanity forward." Barron's reported that Huang believes the Ohio campus could ultimately generate $600 billion in revenue.
Community Benefits and Local Impact
As part of the agreement, OpenAI said it will build on SB Energy's originally announced $40 million community benefits fund with an incremental $40 million, bringing the total commitment to $80 million directed toward affordable energy, job creation, workforce development and local economic priorities. Local reporting has projected tens of thousands of construction jobs tied to the build-out.
The deal underscores how the AI arms race is increasingly being fought with balance sheets as much as with models. Guarantees of this size — effectively Nvidia underwriting the infrastructure its own chips will populate — mark a new phase in which chipmakers, cloud developers and AI labs are financially intertwined across decades-long horizons.
For ongoing AI industry coverage, including how rival build-outs from Anthropic, Google and Meta are reshaping capital spending, the Ohio agreement sets a benchmark that will be difficult to match.
