OpenAI leases 8GW Ohio campus at old uranium plant
The lease we were waiting on is signed: OpenAI is the tenant, Nvidia is the exclusive silicon, and the site used to enrich uranium for the Cold War.
OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease on SB Energy's PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio — up to eight gigawatts of AI capacity on the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, with Nvidia as the exclusive compute supplier. Nvidia will put up credit support on land, power and the building shell for an initial 4.25 gigawatts, with an option on the remaining 3.75, and is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy itself. An SEC filing caps Nvidia's payment obligation on that first phase at $105 billion, phased in from 2028 to 2030 as halls come online. The first 800 megawatts are due by 2028. OpenAI starts paying only as capacity is ready.
This is the same Ohio campus we covered when Nvidia halved a planned $250 billion backstop to $120 billion. The new fact is not another rumor about a guarantee. It is a signed tenant, a locked chip vendor, and a number that has settled: eight gigawatts, not the ten that was floating two weeks ago. Jensen Huang, writing that "OpenAI will pay the lease," is answering the circular-financing charge before the market can finish asking it. The line is technically true and strategically incomplete. If the tenant cannot pay, Nvidia is still on the hook up to $105 billion — and whatever sits on that dirt still has to be Nvidia silicon.
TechCrunch adds the part the press release buries: SB Energy plans a 9.2-gigawatt natural-gas plant on Department of Energy land, at an expected $33 billion, to feed a site that once enriched uranium for the arsenal and the Navy. Nvidia says the campus will create tens of thousands of Ohio jobs and is anchored by an $80 million community-benefits fund. It also says OpenAI's purchases could mean about $600 billion of Nvidia revenue through 2030. That is the real trade. Land and power last twenty years. The chips inside get ripped out every couple of generations. Huang is not underwriting a charity. He is underwriting the only floor plan his next five product cycles are allowed to occupy.
A new Pew survey finds 52 percent of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI in daily life — and for the first time, a majority of adults under 30 say the same. The June 22–28 poll puts young-adult concern at 55 percent, up from 47 percent last year and 31 percent in 2021, while only 11 percent of that group now feel more excited than worried. Job fear is doing the work: 71 percent of adults expect AI to mean fewer US jobs over the next twenty years, including 73 percent of people under 30. The same generation that uses the tools most is cooling fastest. That is not a Luddite story. It is a labor-market one, landing in the same week a former bomb plant is being rewired as an eight-gigawatt factory.
What to watch: whether the 2028 first halls slip, and whether the $105 billion cap is the last number Nvidia's investors will tolerate on a single tenant.
If the people using AI the most are also the most worried about it, what does an 8-gigawatt campus in southern Ohio actually buy? Tell us in the comments.
