PIKETON, Ohio—The site along the Ohio River once enriched uranium for America’s nuclear arsenal. Within a decade, it could host the largest data center on earth, and OpenAI is negotiating to be its only tenant.
The company is in talks to sign a 20-year lease for a 10-gigawatt campus in Pike County, southern Ohio, according to people familiar with the matter. The facility, being developed on federal land with SB Energy, a SoftBank-backed builder, would be OpenAI’s largest single infrastructure commitment by far. Nvidia Corp., the chipmaker whose processors would power the site, has begun discussions about providing credit support for the project, the people said.
A gigawatt is a unit of electricity, and 10 of them is roughly the output of a half-dozen large nuclear reactors. A campus of that size would consume more power than several million American homes, and it would dwarf every data center operating today. The largest existing campuses run in the hundreds of megawatts; even the famous Colossus cluster that Elon Musk’s xAI built in Memphis, Tennessee, is about a tenth of this project’s planned scale.
The deal, if completed, would mark a new phase in the AI infrastructure boom. For the past two years, hyperscale companies have signed long-term leases for data-center capacity in units of hundreds of megawatts. OpenAI’s Ohio ambition moves the unit of account to gigawatts, a step change that tests whether the power grid, the construction industry and the capital markets can respond.
The project’s structure follows a pattern OpenAI has used before. Rather than owning the buildings, the company leases capacity from a developer that handles land, power and construction. SB Energy, which counts SoftBank among its shareholders, would build the campus in phases, with the first tranche of capacity expected to come online around 2028, according to people familiar with the plans.
Nvidia’s role is the sensitive part. The chipmaker has increasingly used its own balance sheet to support customers that buy its processors, a practice critics call circular financing: Nvidia lends or guarantees money to companies that use it to buy Nvidia chips. Nvidia executives say the support is a rational way to secure long-term demand and help its customers bridge the gap between orders and revenue. For the Ohio project, the company’s credit support would be structured as guarantees tied to the lease, not a cash investment, the people said.
The timing tells its own story. Last week, OpenAI confidentially filed paperwork with U.S. securities regulators for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The company has said nothing publicly, but the sequence is deliberate: secure the compute capacity that will generate future revenue, then raise the equity to pay for it in public markets. The Ohio lease is the kind of contracted obligation that underwriters can point to when pricing an IPO.
OpenAI’s capital needs have grown faster than its revenue. The company spends heavily on Nvidia processors, cloud credits and the scientists who train its models. Its backers, led by Microsoft Corp., have poured tens of billions into the company, and an IPO would give those investors a path to liquidity while giving OpenAI a currency for acquisitions and hiring.
The Ohio project also illustrates the constraints of the buildout. Power is the scarce input, and the site at Piketon has advantages: federal ownership, existing substations and transmission corridors left over from the uranium-enrichment era, and a region hungry for jobs. The Department of Energy has been pushing to put federal land to productive use, and a 10-gigawatt data center would be its most visible result.
Local reaction has been mixed. Some residents welcome the construction jobs and tax revenue; others worry about water use, noise and the strain on rural roads. Data-center opponents have filed lawsuits against similar projects in Virginia and Arizona, and Ohio regulators will face their own decisions about grid costs, since the campus will require billions of dollars in transmission upgrades that ratepayers may ultimately share.
For OpenAI, the prize is control over its own destiny. The company has been squeezed by capacity shortages before, when demand for Nvidia’s latest chips outstripped supply. A dedicated 10-gigawatt campus, built to its specifications and powered by its processors of choice, removes that bottleneck for a generation of models.
The lease, if signed, would also reset expectations for the industry. Rivals including Google, Microsoft and Amazon have announced data-center expansions measured in gigawatts, but no single lease of this size has been publicly disclosed. OpenAI’s bet says the company believes its compute needs will keep growing for the next two decades.
Negotiations remain fluid, the people cautioned, and a final agreement could take months. The IPO clock, meanwhile, is running. If the offering proceeds this year, the Ohio lease could be one of the first documents analysts read when they open OpenAI’s prospectus.
