OpenAI is reportedly in advanced talks to lease a proposed 10-gigawatt data center campus in southern Ohio in an arrangement that could include financial backing from Nvidia.
The campus could cost at least $500 billion to build at current prices for chips, power, and construction, The Information reported, citing people familiar with the discussions.
OpenAI would control the computing equipment under a 20-year lease and begin payments once the site starts operating, with the first phase expected in 2028. Nvidia is expected to supply the hardware and guarantee both OpenAI’s lease obligations and the developer’s financing, the report added.
The reported structure highlights a broader shift in AI infrastructure strategy, where model developers, chip suppliers, and energy providers are forging increasingly long-term partnerships to secure compute capacity amid surging demand.
“These types of symbiotic deals are becoming the norm as AI infrastructure rolls out,” said Neil Shah, vice president for research and partner at Counterpoint Research. “If a CIO picks OpenAI to be the base layer, they shouldn’t just accept whatever infrastructure comes with it. CIOs need to negotiate and demand that OpenAI uses a mix of capacity so all your eggs are not in one premium basket like Nvidia.”
OpenAI and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A deeper infrastructure partnership
The reported financing arrangement would extend a relationship that OpenAI and Nvidia formalized last year. In September 2025, the companies announced a partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia stating it intended to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as each gigawatt came online. The first phase is scheduled to use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform.
A lease guarantee would add another layer to that relationship by linking Nvidia not only as OpenAI’s primary hardware supplier but also as a financial backstop for the infrastructure supporting its AI services.
“When a chip supplier guarantees a customer’s lease and the developer’s financing, the relationship stops being vendor and customer. It becomes a sponsor and a tenant,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. “For enterprises, standardizing on OpenAI is therefore no longer a model decision. It is exposure to a single economic gravity field spanning silicon, power, capital, and regulatory attention.”
The site behind the proposal
The campus described in report aligns with a project the US Department of Energy announced in March to redevelop the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio.
Under that partnership, SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, committed to building 10 gigawatts of new power generation capacity, including at least 9.2 gigawatts fueled by natural gas, along with billions of dollars in new transmission infrastructure. The department did not identify a tenant when it unveiled the project.
If the reported negotiations result in a deal, OpenAI would become the operator of the compute infrastructure housed at the site.
What CIOs should watch
For enterprise buyers, the reported deal structure reinforces the need to evaluate AI suppliers beyond model capabilities and pricing, analysts said.
Shah said CIOs should negotiate contracts that preserve infrastructure flexibility and avoid overdependence on a single compute ecosystem.
“OpenAI needs to diversify and offer capacity built on more cost-effective clouds like AWS or Google Cloud,” he said. “Matching the right cloud infrastructure to the right enterprise workload will be a critical strategy for enterprises.”
He also cautioned that projects of this scale typically take years to reach full capacity and carry significant execution risks.
“A 10-gigawatt site won’t just appear overnight and will take at least a decade to fully build out,” Shah said. “Making long-term commitment decisions based on that timeline comes with massive uncertainties.”
Gogia said scale should not be mistaken for access. “More compute does not cure scarcity,” he said. “It reschedules it.” The sharper risk is the financing, he added, which surfaces downstream as minimum commitments, reservation tiers, and usage thresholds even as token prices fall. “Scarcity does not disappear. It becomes contractual.”
The reported lease remains under negotiation, and questions around financing, permitting, and deployment timelines remain unresolved, the report added.
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