OpenAI Joins PORTS-Pike Data Center Project in Southern Ohio

OpenAI is joining the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, a large data center development in Pike County, Ohio, as the anchor customer leasing roughly 8 gigawatts-IT of capacity from developer SB Energy under a 20-year agreement. The facility, built on private land and remediated federal property at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, will run exclusively on NVIDIA AI compute infrastructure and is dedicated to frontier model training and product development.

Details

• Site: The campus sits on private land plus remediated federal property at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio, and will use closed-loop, air-cooled cooling systems
• OpenAI’s commitment: Beyond leasing the capacity, OpenAI is putting $40 million into a community grant fund and providing $84 million in Codex credits for Ohio college students, to be distributed during the 2026-2027 academic year
• Other investors: SB Energy is matching OpenAI’s community commitment with its own $40 million, while NVIDIA is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy; OpenAI says the combined community and infrastructure benefits exceed $160 million
• Jobs: The six-year buildout is projected to support 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 long-term operating positions once complete, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local tax revenue
• Timeline: The first 800 megawatts of capacity are expected to come online in 2028, with the full buildout continuing through 2032
• Cost structure: OpenAI says the project will “pay its own energy and infrastructure costs,” with SB Energy covering grid upgrades and transmission lines rather than shifting those expenses to local ratepayers
• Partners: SB Energy builds, owns, and operates the campus; NVIDIA supplies the compute infrastructure; the U.S. Department of Energy and North America’s Building Trades Unions are also named as partners in the project

What happened next

This is an infrastructure and investment announcement rather than a product launch — the near-term impact is on Ohio’s construction and energy sectors, with the first capacity not expected until 2028. It’s part of OpenAI’s broader pattern of pairing large compute buildouts with local economic commitments (community funds, education credits, union labor involvement) aimed at building political and community support for the data centers its frontier model training increasingly depends on.