Nvidia said on August 17 that it will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a SoftBank Group subsidiary, as part of a deal securing land, power and building capacity at a new Nvidia AI compute campus reserved exclusively for OpenAI, according to the companies’ announcement.
The agreement centers on SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio. Under a 20-year lease, OpenAI will be the site’s sole customer. The companies plan to bring capacity online in phases starting in 2028, with an initial 4.25 gigawatts of AI factory capacity and an option to expand to 8 gigawatts in total — a scale that would rank among the largest AI compute buildouts announced to date.
Grid and community commitments
Beyond its direct stake, Nvidia is providing credit support covering land, power and shell-building costs for the project. SB Energy and SoftBank separately committed to invest at least $4.2 billion in new regional grid infrastructure, working with utility AEP Ohio, the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Commerce.
The partners also expanded a local community benefits fund to $80 million: SB Energy’s original $40 million commitment, topped up by an additional $40 million from OpenAI earmarked for affordable energy, job creation and workforce development in the area.
“AI is becoming infrastructure — the foundation for intelligence in every industry — and land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the announcement. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it “a huge site, with enough computing power to help millions of people use AI to do things we can only start to imagine today.”
Part of a bigger buildout
The Ohio project is one of several large AI data center commitments Nvidia has backed this year, following a $500 billion financing push with Wall Street lenders and a $2 billion investment in AI-factory developer Firmus. Together, the deals show Nvidia moving beyond chip sales into direct financing and infrastructure partnerships with its biggest customers.