Nvidia has announced plans to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer building a data center campus in Pike County, Ohio. OpenAI has already committed to lease the data center for 20 years to run its AI workloads.

Nvidia becomes an SB Energy shareholder

The stake makes Nvidia a shareholder in SB Energy alongside SoftBank Group and OpenAI, according to Nvidia’s newsroom announcement. SB Energy will build, own, and operate the data center, with OpenAI signing on as the tenant and customer under a lease that spans two decades. The investment extends an existing web of financial ties among the three companies: Nvidia agreed in September 2025 to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI tied to the deployment of Nvidia systems at scale, and the companies are already linked through Stargate, the multi-site U.S. data center program that OpenAI and SoftBank announced in January 2025 with Nvidia as a technology partner.

The campus is located on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant site, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment site now being redeveloped on a mix of private and federal land. The plant produced enriched uranium for the U.S. nuclear program until enrichment operations ended in 2001, and the Department of Energy has overseen environmental cleanup at the site for years. OpenAI said in its own statement that it has agreed to secure about 8 gigawatts of IT capacity at the project, which the partners call PORTS-Pike.

OpenAI said it will pay the project’s energy and infrastructure costs directly, and SB Energy has pledged that grid upgrades and new transmission lines will not be passed on to other Ohio ratepayers. That cost question has grown contentious as data center demand rises, with disputes in several states, including Ohio, over who should pay for grid expansion built to serve large computing loads.

Nvidia deepens its exposure to power and physical infrastructure

Nvidia’s release says the company is providing credit support on land, power, and shell construction to secure an initial 4.25 gigawatts of IT capacity, with an option for the remaining 3.75 gigawatts.

“Land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO, said in the announcement, adding that the company is “securing long-lived infrastructure for NVIDIA compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories.”

The site will run exclusively on Nvidia’s DSX platform, which includes GPUs, CPUs, and networking. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also said the project would give “millions of people” access to AI for tasks “from finding new medicines to starting businesses.”

— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) August 17, 2026

— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) August 17, 2026

Power requirements remain central

The capacity figures depend on power generation that still exists only on paper. SB Energy and SoftBank plan to build at least 10 gigawatts of new energy generation to support the 8 gigawatts of IT capacity, and they also plan to invest at least $4.2 billion in regional grid infrastructure through a partnership with AEP Ohio, according to Nvidia’s release.

The development is expected to proceed in stages. OpenAI said the first 800 megawatts is expected to come online in 2028, largely on existing AEP infrastructure, while later phases will require new power plants, including natural gas generation. Long lead times for new generation and transmission have made power availability a leading constraint on U.S. data center construction, one reason AI developers have increasingly lined up dedicated energy supplies and sites directly.

To limit water use, the data center will use closed-loop, air-cooled systems that recirculate water through cooling towers instead of consuming it. OpenAI said ongoing use will resemble that of an office building once the system is filled.

Ohio project pitched as an economic boost

The PORTS-Pike partners are presenting the project as a way to create jobs and generate revenue for an Ohio region that has lost its industrial anchor. OpenAI said the development could create about 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent operating roles, and it includes a memorandum of understanding with North America’s Building Trades Unions.

OpenAI is also contributing an additional $40 million to a fund that SB Energy had already committed $40 million to, bringing the initial pool to $80 million.

Separately, OpenAI said it will make up to $84 million in Codex credits available to about 844,000 Ohio college and technical students, or $100 each, during the 2026–2027 school year. Including the community grant, OpenAI said the total benefits exceed $160 million.