OpenAI is negotiating to lease what would be one of the largest AI data center campuses ever built: a 10-gigawatt facility in Pike County, Ohio. To put that in perspective, 10 GW is roughly enough electricity to power every home in a state the size of Ohio. And OpenAI wants it all for AI compute.

The project sits at the heart of OpenAI’s Stargate initiative, which carries a projected price tag exceeding $500 billion over a 20-year rental agreement. The first phase, targeting 800 megawatts of capacity, is expected to come online by 2028. Meanwhile, Nvidia is reportedly in discussions to provide credit support or act as a financial backstop for the deal, layering a hardware giant’s balance sheet underneath OpenAI’s infrastructure ambitions.

What the Ohio campus actually looks like

The planned site is the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a sprawling piece of federal land that once enriched uranium during the Cold War. Now it’s being repositioned as the foundation for America’s AI future.

SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, is handling the development side. The project involves a public-private partnership with the Department of Energy, which is leasing the federal land. The campus is expected to integrate co-located power generation capabilities, including 9.2 GW of natural gas capacity, directly on site.

Nvidia’s role goes beyond selling chips

Nvidia has previously committed $100 billion toward hardware deployments related to OpenAI’s broader initiatives. But discussing credit support means Nvidia could be putting its own financial credibility on the line to help this deal get done.

For Nvidia investors specifically, the credit support discussions introduce a new dimension of risk and opportunity. On one hand, Nvidia deepens its strategic entrenchment in the AI infrastructure buildout. On the other hand, acting as a financial backstop means Nvidia’s balance sheet becomes partially exposed to the execution risk of a construction project that won’t be fully operational for years.

The Stargate initiative in context

The Ohio campus is one piece of OpenAI’s larger Stargate program, which involves collaborations with Oracle and SoftBank across multiple locations in the US. The initiative’s ambition is staggering: 10 GW of total AI infrastructure capacity backed by up to $500 billion in investment.

The Stargate program reportedly aims to reach its full 10 GW and $500 billion scale by the end of 2025, ahead of original timelines. That timeline is aggressive, to say the least. Building 800 MW by 2028 for just the first phase of the Ohio site alone suggests the broader target involves parallel construction across several geographies simultaneously.

The DOE’s willingness to lease federal land for this purpose marks a notable precedent. The partnership signals that Washington views AI infrastructure as a strategic national priority, not unlike how it treated semiconductor manufacturing with the CHIPS Act.

What this means for investors

The natural gas component deserves attention. Integrating 9.2 GW of gas-fired power generation directly into an AI campus means this project will face scrutiny from environmental regulators and climate-focused investors. AI companies have broadly pledged carbon neutrality goals, and powering the world’s largest data center with natural gas creates a tension that won’t resolve itself quietly.