OpenAI eyes 10-GW Ohio AI data center backed by Nvidia in historic infrastructure push

OpenAI has entered talks to lease a 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio through funding provided by Nvidia. If finalized, the agreement would rank among the largest single-site commitments to AI computing ever made, signaling that the race to build physical AI infrastructure has moved into a new phase.

The data center would sit on federal land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio. In March 2026, the US Department of Energy announced a partnership with SoftBank Group and its subsidiary SB Energy to redevelop the site, with SB Energy committing to build 10 GW of new power generation capacity, including at least 9.2 GW from natural gas, according to a DOE fact sheet.

How the Ohio project compares with existing data center markets

A 10 GW load at a single location would be an entirely new scale. As Cryptopolitan reported in September, OpenAI’s Stargate project currently spans seven sites, the Abilene, Texas flagship plus six locations in Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Lordstown, Ohio. Together they add up to roughly 7 GW of planned capacity. The proposed Piketon campus alone would exceed that entire combined footprint.

The Northern Virginia data center market, the world’s largest hub, held roughly 5 GW of capacity in 2025. The Ohio campus would be about double that, and larger than the power generation of several national grids.

The scale also dwarfs other recent AI infrastructure deals. In late 2025, BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia, and xAI led the acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, gaining roughly 5 GW of capacity across more than 50 facilities globally. The Piketon site would deliver twice that on a single campus.

OpenAI and Nvidia’s 10-gigawatt AI infrastructure strategy

The Ohio project sits inside the $500 billion Stargate program announced by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and President Donald Trump at the White House in January 2025.

By September 2025, OpenAI had pushed Stargate to nearly 7 GW across the seven sites, with more than $400 billion in committed investment over three years. The Piketon campus would mark a major expansion beyond that footprint, and Ohio’s second Stargate-linked site alongside Lordstown.

Nvidia’s role in the Ohio facility goes beyond chip supply. In September 2025, Nvidia and OpenAI signed a letter of intent for at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia committing up to $100 billion in OpenAI as capacity comes online. The first gigawatt was targeted for the second half of 2026 using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform.

“Everything starts with compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in the September 2025 partnership announcement. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future.” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, framed the partnership in similar terms: “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward, deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”

Why the Ohio project matters for the global AI race

The scale reflects a calculation shared across the industry: training and running next-generation models will require orders of magnitude more compute than current systems provide.

OpenAI’s head of data centers, Chris Malone, told Data Center Dynamics that the company has “a very strong conviction about scaling laws” and is “short on capacity constantly.”

The energy commitment carries global implications. SB Energy’s plan to build 9.2 GW of natural gas generation alongside $4.2 billion in new transmission infrastructure with AEP Ohio is a bet that AI demand will reshape energy markets and grid planning for years.

The DOE noted that SB Energy committed to making excess generation and transmission capacity available to consumers and is funding accelerated environmental cleanup at the former uranium enrichment site.

Utilities are already adjusting investment plans for surging AI demand. Dominion Energy, whose territory covers parts of Northern Virginia, lifted its five-year capital expenditure outlook to $50.1 billion on rising electricity demand from data centers, and reported that contracted power capacity from data centers had risen 88% from mid-2024 levels.

For competing AI developers and foreign governments watching the buildout, the message is clear: the United States is converting Cold War-era nuclear infrastructure into AI compute capacity, backed by Japanese capital and American chipmaking.

SoftBank’s $33 billion commitment to the Portsmouth power project is part of a broader $550 billion Japanese investment package under the US-Japan trade deal, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in March.

Industry observers now treat AI campuses as large infrastructure projects rather than traditional tech campuses. Stargate’s larger 10 GW target consumes more power than New York City uses today.

OpenAI’s infrastructure partners include Oracle, SoftBank, CoreWeave, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The company crossed 1 billion monthly active app users in May, the fastest application ever to reach that milestone, and filed its confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1.

What’s next for OpenAI’s Ohio expansion

The Ohio lease terms have not been finalized. Whether OpenAI can secure the power, permitting, and capital to fill 10 GW at a single site remains an open question.

Stargate has moved faster than its original timeline suggested, but its total cost projections, now above $1 trillion when combined with OpenAI’s cloud commitments per Altman, exceed what any single company or consortium has ever deployed in data center history.

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