NVIDIA has agreed to back as much as $105 billion of financing for a giant new data center campus in Pike County, Ohio that will be leased by OpenAI, according to reporting from Bloomberg and The Information on August 17, 2026. As part of the same package, Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank Group-backed developer that will build and own the site.
The economics of a 20-year lease at gigawatt scale
The campus, known as PORTS-Pike, is expected to scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts to as much as 8 GW and begin operating in 2028. SB Energy will construct and long-term own the site; OpenAI will lease it for 20 years. In exchange for underwriting the financing, Nvidia will serve as the sole compute supplier — a structural lock-in that ensures every rack of Blackwell and Rubin silicon at the campus is Nvidia's. The arrangement follows the mold of Firebird's Armenia AI factory, another Nvidia-anchored gigawatt-scale build announced this month.
Nvidia is becoming the AI economy's financier
The Ohio backing lands days after Nvidia pledged $5 billion to Intel and announced participation in the broader OpenAI $100 billion, 10-gigawatt infrastructure commitment. Taken together, Nvidia is now functioning as both chip supplier and balance-sheet anchor for AI's biggest customers. That circular flow — Nvidia guarantees financing, customers build data centers, data centers buy Nvidia silicon — accelerates construction but tightens the interdependence that regulators, analysts and rival cloud providers are watching closely. A separate Wall Street Journal analysis this week put nine leading tech companies' off-balance-sheet AI commitments at roughly $3 trillion.
Ohio joins the AI industrial map
The PORTS-Pike site will add materially to SB Energy's existing 5 GW operating and under-construction portfolio and to its stated pipeline of more than 15 GW of solar and 12 GWh of energy storage. It also cements Ohio as a strategic AI region alongside Texas and Virginia. For OpenAI, which recently absorbed NextSlide and continues to expand ChatGPT's enterprise footprint, the Ohio lease locks in the electricity and compute needed to keep training and serving frontier models through the end of the decade.
Reporting based on coverage from Bloomberg, CNBC, The Information, TechCrunch, TechStartups and SB Energy's own disclosures.