OpenAI joins PORTS-Pike project

What happened

S. Department of Energy. We want to develop this project as a partner to Pike County—paying its project-specific energy and infrastructure costs, using water responsibly, creating opportunities for local workers and businesses, and making long-term investments shaped by the community. The project is expected to create 35,000 construction jobs during its six-year buildout through 2032 and 2,500 long-term operating jobs.

SB Energy will build, own, and operate the data center under a 20-year lease to OpenAI and deliver capacity over time. OpenAI will be the customer and will utilize capacity at the site, which will exclusively host NVIDIA AI compute infrastructure. We are contracting for this capacity based on our projected long-term needs for frontier training and growing demand for our products.

OpenAI will begin paying only as completed capacity becomes available for lease and will fund those commitments through revenue and cash flow from the significant growth of our business and capital raised from investors. 25 IT-GW. Development will depend on the necessary infrastructure, permits, environmental reviews, and financing being in place. NVIDIA and OpenAI are collaborating through design, testing, and commissioning at the data center.

The companies will also jointly publish a technical white paper sharing lessons from PORTS-Pike—including how resilient infrastructure design, rigorous data center component qualification, and software-level workload management can support higher compute availability, greater reliability, and longer mean time between interruptions at cluster scale—helping establish the data center as a model for future next gen supercomputer design.

We expect to use this capacity to meet growing demand for advanced AI and maintain our lead as the frontier AI research laboratory in pursuit of our mission. Data centers like the PORTS-Pike Technology Data Center are part of the physical foundation behind AI.

Together with chips, power, and high-speed networks, they allow us to develop more capable systems and make tools like ChatGPT and Codex more reliable, affordable, and available to more people and businesses. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

Why it matters

We will also invest $40 million in a community grant fund supporting priorities identified by local residents—building on SB Energy’s previously announced $40 million commitment. Separately, we are providing $84 million in Codex credits through ChatGPT, giving every Ohio college student access to the technology.

Pike County helped power America’s industrial growth in the 20th century and now, with this project, it has another opportunity to play a leading role in the next era of American industrialization. We want it to be a catalyst for jobs, business growth, and investment across Southern Ohio—and to help make this a place where young people can build careers, raise families, and choose to stay.

As we become part of the community, these principles will guide our work: We will continue to meet with residents, local officials, schools, businesses, labor organizations, and community groups to help shape an Ohio Community Compact. The Compact will reflect local priorities and turn these principles into specific, public measures as the project moves forward.

There is significant work ahead, and the full data center will not be built all at once. SB Energy is developing the project across private land and remediated land controlled by the Department of Energy at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. We appreciate the Trump Administration’s leadership in helping advance the redevelopment of this federal site for American AI infrastructure.

This gives a site that once supported American industry and national security a new role building infrastructure for the Intelligence Era. The first 800 megawatts are expected to become available in 2028 largely using existing AEP infrastructure. Further development will require new power plants connected to the grid, including natural gas generation, as well as new transmission lines and associated infrastructure. com⁠(opens in a new window).

What to watch

The better we build it, the more people can use AI to learn, create, solve problems, start businesses, and do work that was previously out of reach. Our responsibility is to make sure the communities helping build it share meaningfully in those benefits. We look forward to working with Pike County and the broader Southern Ohio region as it begins the next chapter of its long contribution to American progress.