OpenAI is in talks to lease a 10-gigawatt data center at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio, with Nvidia providing the funding — a deal that, if closed, would rank as the largest single-site AI compute commitment ever made. The proposed campus would exceed the combined planned capacity of OpenAI's entire seven-site Stargate network and roughly double the Northern Virginia data center market, currently the world's largest hub at around 5 GW of capacity.
What 10 Gigawatts Actually Means
A gigawatt is one billion watts of electrical power — the output of a large nuclear reactor, enough to supply a sizeable city. Ten gigawatts concentrated at a single site has no real precedent in data center history. A late-2025 deal in which BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia, and xAI acquired Aligned Data Centers gave those parties roughly 5 GW spread across more than 50 global facilities. The Ohio campus would match that on a single plot. For further scale, Stargate's 10 GW target would consume more power than New York City uses today.
OpenAI's head of data centers, Chris Malone, told Data Center Dynamics that the company has "a very strong conviction about scaling laws" and is "short on capacity constantly." That is a candid admission: demand for compute — the processing power used to train and run AI models — is outrunning supply by design, not accident.
The Infrastructure Behind the Deal
The site fits inside the $500 billion Stargate program announced by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and President Donald Trump in January 2025. By September 2025, Stargate had reached nearly 7 GW across seven sites, backed by more than $400 billion in committed investment. Piketon would be Ohio's second Stargate-linked location alongside an existing site in Lordstown, and would push total capacity well past the original program's scope.
Power is the harder problem. SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, committed under a March 2026 Department of Energy partnership to build 10 GW of new generation at the site — at least 9.2 GW of it from natural gas — alongside $4.2 billion in new transmission infrastructure with AEP Ohio. SoftBank's $33 billion stake in the Portsmouth power project is part of a broader $550 billion Japanese investment package tied to the US-Japan trade deal, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in March. Converting a former uranium enrichment facility into a gas-powered AI campus is a notable choice for an industry that also markets sustainability credentials.
Nvidia's Role and What Remains Unresolved
Nvidia is not simply supplying chips here. In September 2025, Nvidia and OpenAI signed a letter of intent for at least 10 GW of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia committing up to $100 billion in OpenAI as capacity comes online. The first gigawatt was targeted for the second half of 2026 on Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform. When the entity funding your lease is also your primary chip vendor and a major equity backer, the buyer-seller relationship deserves scrutiny.
The lease terms are not finalized. Sam Altman has said total costs across Stargate and related cloud commitments now exceed $1 trillion — a figure larger than any data center buildout in recorded history. Whether OpenAI can secure the permits, power agreements, and capital to fill 10 GW at a single site is the question the announcement does not answer.