OpenAI weighs 10-gigawatt Ohio data center lease with Nvidia backing

OpenAI is weighing one of the largest AI infrastructure bets yet: a proposed 10-gigawatt data center campus on federal land in southern Ohio that could cost at least $500 billion to build. The plan would give OpenAI control of the equipment under a 20-year lease, with payments starting only after operations begin, and the first phase would not come online until 2028.

The project would be developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The campus is described as being on roughly 3,700 acres of Energy Department land, placing a commercial AI buildout inside a federally controlled site that has already become central to Washington’s energy and industrial policy.

The U.S. Department of Energy and SB Energy publicly announced a partnership in March 2026 tied to the same site, with SB Energy saying it planned to build 10 gigawatts of new power generation, including 9.2 gigawatts of natural gas, to support a new 10-gigawatt data center development. DOE said SB Energy and AEP Ohio also committed to $4.2 billion in new electrical transmission infrastructure, underscoring the size of the grid buildout required before any compute can go live.

That infrastructure burden is what makes the Ohio plan more than a real-estate deal. DOE said SB Energy would pay for accelerated cleanup and remediation at the Portsmouth Site, while the department’s Environmental Management office described the project as the world’s largest artificial intelligence data center planned on leased DOE land. The agency framed the arrangement as a public-private partnership to power advanced computing while protecting American families from shouldering certain power costs, a signal that the federal government sees the project as a test case for how far private AI companies can stretch public land, utilities and remediation resources.

Nvidia is expected to supply hardware and provide a financial guarantee for OpenAI’s lease and SB Energy’s financing, adding another layer of backing to a buildout that depends on chips, capital, land and transmission all arriving on schedule. The talks come as OpenAI has already run into the same constraints overseas: in April 2026, it paused its Stargate UK project, citing high energy costs and regulatory uncertainty. If the Ohio campus advances, it would show how the next phase of AI is being shaped as much by power grids and permitting as by model design.