Nvidia Puts $1.5B and a Financing Guarantee Behind OpenAI's 8 GW Ohio Campus

Nvidia announced on August 17, 2026 that it will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy and serve as the exclusive AI compute infrastructure provider for the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, a data center site being built in Pike County, Ohio. SB Energy — backed by SoftBank Group and OpenAI — will build, own and operate the campus under a 20-year lease to OpenAI as sole tenant. The initial phase covers 4.25 GW of IT capacity, with Nvidia holding an option to fund a further 3.75 GW, for a potential 8 GW total.

What is known

Per Nvidia’s own press release, the deal structure has Nvidia as both financier and exclusive compute vendor: it is putting equity into SB Energy alongside existing investors SoftBank and OpenAI, while also guaranteeing that its DSX AI factory platform — GPUs, CPUs and networking — fills the campus. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the deal as a land-and-power play: “AI is becoming infrastructure — the foundation for intelligence in every industry — and land, power and shell have become vital.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s statement, carried via OpenAI’s own newsroom account, called it “a huge site, with enough computing power to help millions of people use AI.”

The site sits on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility, according to public broadcaster WOSU’s coverage of the Pike County announcement — the “PORTS” in the project name refers to that site. Nvidia’s release also cites a planned $4.2 billion grid infrastructure investment through a partnership with AEP Ohio, and roughly 10 GW of new power generation from SB Energy and SoftBank to support the campus; the release does not specify what fuel or generation mix that capacity will come from.

A widely cited $105 billion figure for Nvidia’s total financing exposure — reported by Bloomberg and repeated by CNBC and other outlets — has not been confirmed in Nvidia’s own statement, which discloses the $1.5 billion equity investment but not a headline financing total. Readers should treat the $105 billion number as a media-reported estimate, not a company-confirmed figure.

What it means for a power buyer

PORTS-Pike is a single-tenant, build-to-suit campus, not colocation capacity — it will never show up as leasable space in a market like the ones tracked in our colocation price index. But the structure is worth watching for anyone pricing AI compute: Nvidia is increasingly acting as financier and guarantor of demand for entire campuses, a mechanic that concentrates future GPU supply into dedicated, single-customer sites rather than the multi-tenant colocation and neocloud capacity our GPU price tracker follows. If that pattern holds, near-term GPU rental pricing is unlikely to move — first power isn’t expected before 2028 — but it signals where incremental Nvidia-class compute is heading over the next several years: fewer large, dedicated campuses rather than broader colocation supply growth.

The deal also extends a financing pattern our SMR and nuclear power guide has tracked in hyperscaler deals generally: long-dated leases (here, 20 years) paired with vendor-backed capital commitments to de-risk multi-gigawatt build-outs before power is secured. PORTS-Pike’s power plan leans on new generation and grid buildout rather than an announced nuclear source, but the scale of the AEP Ohio partnership ($4.2 billion) shows grid operators are being asked to underwrite AI campuses at a size that dwarfs typical colocation-market power requests.

What we don’t know

Nvidia’s release does not disclose what percentage equity stake its $1.5 billion buys in SB Energy, nor the source mix behind the planned 10 GW of new generation. No construction timeline has been given for the campus beyond “phases starting in 2028,” and it is unclear how the $105 billion financing figure circulating in press coverage relates to Nvidia’s confirmed $1.5 billion investment — whether it includes projected compute purchases, credit guarantees, or other instruments has not been detailed by either company.