Nvidia buys the landlord: a $1.5bn equity stake in OpenAI's Ohio power developer

Nvidia said on Monday it will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed developer building an 8-gigawatt data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, which OpenAI has committed to lease for 20 years ^[1][2][3][4]. Nvidia is not simply selling into this buildout, it is capitalising it: the announcement makes the chipmaker a shareholder in the landlord alongside SoftBank Group and OpenAI, and the site will run exclusively on Nvidia's DSX platform of GPUs, CPUs and networking ^[5][8].

The structure matters more than the cheque. SB Energy will build, own and operate the campus, sited on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, with OpenAI as tenant and customer ^[6][14]. Nvidia's release describes credit support on land, power and shell construction to lock in an initial 4.25 gigawatts of IT capacity, with an option on the remaining 3.75 ^[7]. That puts 53 percent of the headline number under firm commitment and the rest under an option ^[1]. "Land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI," Jensen Huang said in the announcement ^[9]. OpenAI already had a stake in SB Energy, and Sam Altman was an early investor, according to CNBC ^[25].

The electricity does not exist yet. SB Energy and SoftBank plan at least 10 gigawatts of new generation to produce 8 gigawatts of IT capacity, a ratio of 1.25 to 1 ^[11][2], plus at least $4.2 billion in regional grid infrastructure through a partnership with AEP Ohio ^[12]. OpenAI says the first 800 megawatts, a tenth of the headline figure, arrives in 2028 and leans largely on existing AEP infrastructure; later phases require new power plants, including natural gas generation ^[13][3].

The financing context is the part to price. CNBC previously reported that Nvidia was discussing a backstop of up to $250 billion to let OpenAI raise debt for a 10-gigawatt Ohio project, and reported that the Wall Street Journal said last week Nvidia would cut that guarantee to less than $120 billion, a reduction of more than $130 billion ^[15][16][4]. Against that, $1.5 billion of equity is roughly 1.3 percent of even the reduced figure ^[5]. Nvidia lined up $500 billion in financing for customers buying its hardware last week, part of a run of manoeuvres that CNBC says has raised concerns about circular financing in the AI trade ^[17][18].

The local ledger is thinner than the headline. OpenAI says total community benefits exceed $160 million ^[22]. Of that, $80 million is a grant pool, half from OpenAI and half already committed by SB Energy ^[20], and up to $84 million is Codex credits worth $100 each for about 844,000 Ohio college and technical students in the 2026-2027 school year ^[21]. Those two items alone come to $164 million, so about half the advertised benefit is credit for OpenAI's own product ^[6]. OpenAI projects 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent roles, with a memorandum of understanding signed with North America's Building Trades Unions ^[19][27]. OpenAI says it will pay the project's energy and infrastructure costs directly, and SB Energy has pledged that grid upgrades and new transmission will not appear on other Ohio ratepayers' bills ^[23]. Cooling is closed-loop and air-cooled ^[24].

For anyone else budgeting for compute or queueing for an interconnect, the comparison set has changed. OpenAI president Greg Brockman told CNBC that compute is "really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age" ^[26]. Bidders without a supplier willing to take equity in their power developer are bidding against one that does.