ChatGPT maker OpenAI will lease a huge new data center in the US for 20 years, backed by a $105 billion financing commitment from Nvidia, as per a regulatory filing published Monday.
The venture will be built on the site of a former Cold War-era uranium enrichment plant in Ohio and could finally develop to have 8 GW of capacity, making it the largest single data center for artificial intelligence (AI).
The data center will also run “completely” on Nvidia chips.
SoftBank and the data center’s owner, a subsidiary called SB Energy, will invest more than $4 billion in local energy infrastructure and “build at least 10 GW of new energy generation” to power the data center. OpenAI will commit $40 million to “support local priorities.”
Also, Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, even though the company preemptively pushed back on critiques about so-called circular financing, which has fueled fears about an AI bubble that will eventually burst.
“OpenAI will pays the lease,” Nvidia wrote in a blog post Monday, including that the deal was made with “the same discipline we apply to supply-chain management.”
Moreover, Nvidia’s financing guarantee—its largest—marks a shift in scale for a practice that has become common in the sector: In spite of explosive revenue revenue , AI developers nevertheless rely on financial backing from their own suppliers to build the giant infrastructure underpinning this technological revolution.
Huge site
Nvidia formerly considered offering a backstop of $250 billion, as per The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg in July. Nvidia’s shares fell 5% after those reports, but they’re up more than 19% this year.
“This is going to be a big site, with sufficient computing power to support millions of people use AI to do things we can only begin to imagine today,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mention in a announcement.
OpenAI anticipates the venture to form 35,000 temporary construction jobs over 6 years and 2,500 “long-term operating jobs,” it mentioned in a blog post.
Promises about jobs and energy investments are a response to developing hostility toward data centers, which require huge amounts of electricity and water to operate.
More than 70% of Americans oppose building them close to their houses, as per to a Gallup poll from March, and rising electricity bills, linked in part to these sites, are fueling debate within the midterm elections.
OpenAI and SB Energy maintain that they’ll cover the data center’s energy and infrastructure costs without passing them on to local residents.
The data center will first of all have 4.25 GW of capacity, with the possibility of adding an additional 3.75 GW. A nuclear power plant can offer around 1 GW of power.
The whole city of San Francisco used just over 5 GW of energy in 2024, as per state data.
Last year, OpenAI, Nvidia and SoftBank—along other partners including Oracle—also introduced a $500 billion multiyear data center venture referred to as Stargate, in which they have devoted to constructing out 10 GW of capacity across more than one sites. Half of that capacity is being built in the UAE.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which now owns his AI subsidiary SpaceXAI, has 1 GW of capacity at its Colossus data centers across Tennessee and Mississippi. Meta has a 5 GW data center venture in Louisiana.
