OpenAI has entered into discussions to lease a massive 10-gigawatt data center campus on federal land in Pike County, Ohio, with Nvidia expected to supply chips and provide financial backing for the project. If finalized, the 20-year lease would rank among the largest single-site commitments to AI computing ever made, potentially costing over $500 billion based on current prices for chips, labor, power, and construction.
The facility would rise at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era uranium enrichment site. In March 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a partnership with SoftBank Group and its subsidiary SB Energy to redevelop the location. SB Energy committed to building 10 GW of new power generation capacity, including at least 9.2 GW from natural gas, along with $4.2 billion in new transmission infrastructure in cooperation with AEP Ohio. The DOE noted that excess generation and transmission capacity would be made available to consumers, and the project would also fund accelerated environmental cleanup at the site.
At 10 GW, the proposed Ohio campus would dwarf even the world’s largest existing data center markets. Northern Virginia, the top global hub, held roughly 5 GW of capacity in 2025. The Ohio site would be double that, and also twice the combined 5 GW capacity that BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia, and xAI acquired across more than 50 facilities globally in late 2025. It would exceed the entire 7 GW planned across OpenAI’s existing Stargate projects in Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Lordstown, Ohio.
The Ohio project is part of the $500 billion Stargate program unveiled by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and former President Donald Trump in January 2025. In September 2025, OpenAI and Nvidia signed a letter of intent for at least 10 GW of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia committing up to $100 billion in OpenAI. The first gigawatt was targeted for late 2026 using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. “Everything starts with compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the time. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang added, “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward, deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”
Lease payments would begin after operations start, with the first phase expected online in 2028. SoftBank’s $33 billion commitment to the power project is part of a broader $550 billion Japanese investment package under the U.S.-Japan trade deal, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said. OpenAI, which crossed 1 billion monthly active app users in May and confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO on June 1, is betting that training and running next-generation AI models will require orders of magnitude more compute than what is currently available.
