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.
