Nvidia’s $1.5 billion SB Energy investment, announced on 17 August 2026, will make the chipmaker the sole supplier of compute infrastructure at the PORTS-Pike data centre near Cincinnati, Ohio, a facility that SB Energy will build, own, and operate under a 20-year lease to OpenAI.
The equity stake is only part of the commitment. Nvidia has also agreed to provide up to $105 billion in credit support to help build the facility, with the campus designed to scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts of IT load to 8 gigawatts.
According to Nvidia’s 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company entered multiple residual value guaranties with SB Energy covering approximately 4.25 gigawatts of IT load at the Portsmouth Site, with each agreement becoming effective upon commencement of the applicable lease. Nvidia also holds the option, exercisable at its sole discretion, to provide credit support to secure approximately an additional 3.8 gigawatts at the site. The snippet put that optional figure at 3.75 gigawatts; the SEC filing specifies approximately 3.8 gigawatts, which is the figure used here.
What the Nvidia SB Energy Investment Means for Ohio
The scale of the project extends well beyond the data centre. SB Energy and SoftBank plan to build at least 10 gigawatts of new energy generation, enabling 8 IT-gigawatts of AI factory capacity, and to invest at least $4.2 billion in regional grid infrastructure, according to a joint press release filed with the SEC. An initial $80 million community benefits fund anchors the project’s local commitments.
CNBC reports that OpenAI said the data centre will support 35,000 new construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 long-term positions. Capacity is expected to come online in phases beginning in 2028.
The site itself carries unusual history. The land is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and previously served as a uranium enrichment facility for the country’s nuclear arsenal and its Navy submarines.
Power Costs and the Natural Gas Constraint
SB Energy will build a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas power plant on the site at an expected cost of $33 billion, a sum that reflects how sharply the economics of gas generation have shifted. Natural gas power plant costs have risen 66% in the last two years, according to BloombergNEF.
The pressure may not ease once the plant is operational. By the time PORTS-Pike and comparable facilities come online, they will compete for natural gas supply with export markets, a dynamic that could triple prices in some regions of the country.
Nvidia’s involvement does more than secure a customer. According to Engineering News-Record, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that each generation of AI factory systems deployed at PORTS-Pike could represent approximately 1.5 million Nvidia GPUs, equating to roughly $150 billion to $200 billion in Nvidia revenue per upgrade cycle, with the 20-year lease capable of supporting multiple such cycles.
That framing repositions the $1.5 billion equity cheque: at those revenue projections, it functions less as a financial investment than as a mechanism to guarantee captive demand.
SB Energy’s Path to This Point
SB Energy, based in Redwood City, California, began life as a solar and battery storage developer before expanding into natural gas generation and digital infrastructure. Its transformation into a data centre developer accelerated over the past year.
In January, OpenAI and SoftBank each committed $500 million to SB Energy and tapped the company to build and operate OpenAI’s 1.2-gigawatt data centre in Milam County, Texas, according to Energy Connects, citing Bloomberg. By the time of that report, SB Energy had raised more than $1.8 billion from SoftBank, OpenAI, and Ares Management combined to fund its data centre ambitions.
Reuters reports that OpenAI and SoftBank each committed approximately $500 million to SB Energy in an earlier round, months before the Nvidia deal. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an early personal investor in the company, according to CNBC.
SoftBank’s position has shifted as the project evolved. The conglomerate had held $5.8 billion worth of Nvidia stock, which it sold in November to help fund other AI investments. Now it is on the other side of the ledger, with Nvidia supplying the capital and the chips.
The first phases of the PORTS-Pike campus are expected online in 2028. Whether the power plant, the grid, and the natural gas supply can keep pace with that schedule is the question that will shape everything that follows.
