Nvidia announced a $1.5 billion investment in SB Energy, a data center developer linked to SoftBank and OpenAI, guaranteeing that Nvidia chips will power OpenAI’s largest planned computing facility near Cincinnati, Ohio.
The deal makes Nvidia the sole supplier of compute infrastructure at OpenAI’s Ports-Pike Technology Campus, which could scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts to 8 gigawatts of capacity. Nvidia will also provide up to $105 billion in credit to help build the facility, according to documents filed with the SEC.
A $33 Billion Power Plant on Federal Land
SB Energy will construct a 9.2 gigawatt natural gas power plant on the site, which is land owned by the US Department of Energy that previously enriched uranium for the nuclear arsenal and Navy submarines. The power plant alone is expected to cost $33 billion, reflecting the skyrocketing costs of building natural gas infrastructure that have risen 66% in two years, according to BloombergNEF.
SoftBank, a key backer of SB Energy, previously held $5.8 billion worth of Nvidia stock before selling its entire stake in November to fund other AI investments. The circular nature of the deal, with Nvidia now investing back into a SoftBank-linked entity, illustrates the complex web of financial relationships underpinning the AI infrastructure boom.
By the time SB Energy’s power plant and competing facilities come online, they will be competing for natural gas with export markets, a situation that analysts warn could triple natural gas prices in some parts of the country. The energy demands of AI data centers have become one of the most contentious aspects of the industry’s rapid expansion.
Nvidia Locks In Its Compute Ecosystem
The investment is a strategic play by Nvidia to anchor the AI compute ecosystem to its own hardware. By ensuring its chips are the exclusive infrastructure at one of the world’s largest planned data centers, Nvidia is not just selling GPUs but controlling where the next generation of AI models will be trained and deployed.
The deal comes as Nvidia expands aggressively beyond chip sales, positioning itself as a full-stack infrastructure provider for AI. The company has been building out its Nemotron open-weight model family, acquiring data center partnerships, and investing in power generation to address the compute crunch that threatens to bottleneck the entire AI industry.
Sources: TechCrunch; Nvidia Blog; SEC filings; BloombergNEF
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