OpenAI has made a strategic move, securing approximately 8 gigawatts of computing power as part of the ambitious AI campus project PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio. According to my data, this is one of the largest agreements in industry history: 4.25 GW is already guaranteed, and an option for an additional 3.8 GW allows the company to flexibly scale up infrastructure as demand for artificial intelligence models grows.
The key partner is SB Energy, which will take on the construction, ownership, and operation of the data center under a 20-year lease. The first 800 MW of capacity is expected to come online as early as 2028 — a critically important deadline given the current shortage of GPU clusters for training and inference of large language models.
Particular attention is drawn to NVIDIA's involvement: the company is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy and becoming the exclusive supplier of AI computing infrastructure. This is not just a financial deal but vertical integration — NVIDIA provides not only chips but also the full software stack, giving OpenAI direct access to the most advanced hardware solutions without intermediaries.
The project also includes the construction of 10 GW of new electricity generation, underscoring the energy challenge of the AI revolution. Additionally, investments of $4.2 billion in the regional power grid and the creation of a community benefit fund for the county totaling $80 million are planned — a clear attempt to mitigate the social impact of the megaproject on the local community.
In my assessment, this move signals a new era in the competition for computing resources. OpenAI is not just leasing capacity — it is building a long-term energy-computing ecosystem that will become the foundation for AGI development. The question remains whether competitors such as Anthropic or Google DeepMind can respond with comparable infrastructure initiatives, and how this will affect the balance of power in the industry.