Nvidia Finances $100B OpenAI Data Center, Squeezing Bitcoin Miners Out
What You Need to Know
- OpenAI and Nvidia plan 10-gigawatt Ohio data center, largest single-site AI compute commitment ever made.
- One Ohio campus would exceed entire Stargate program’s 7 GW capacity across seven sites.
- Nvidia investing up to $100 billion as co-investor and chip supplier, unprecedented vertical integration model.
- SB Energy planning 9.2 GW natural gas generation, making AI scaling dependent on fossil fuel infrastructure.
OpenAI and Nvidia are in talks to lease a single 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio, to be built on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War uranium enrichment site. If it closes, this would be the largest single-site AI compute commitment ever made, roughly double the entire Northern Virginia data center market and larger than the combined planned capacity of all seven existing Stargate locations.
The scale matters beyond the headline number. The entire Stargate program, announced with considerable fanfare at the White House in January 2025, targets around 7 GW across seven sites with over $400 billion in committed investment. One campus in Pike County, Ohio would exceed that footprint. Nvidia’s involvement here is not simply as a chip supplier: the September 2025 letter of intent ties up to $100 billion in Nvidia capital to OpenAI as compute capacity comes online, making Nvidia a co-investor in the infrastructure it is also equipping. That vertical integration, chip design plus financing plus deployment, has no real precedent in the semiconductor industry’s history.
The energy side of this deal is the constraint nobody is solving cleanly: SB Energy is planning 9.2 GW of new natural gas generation to power it, which means the AI scaling bet is also a fossil fuel infrastructure bet.
For crypto infrastructure operators and Bitcoin miners, this is the dynamic that has been quietly compressing their competitive position for two years. Industrial-scale power procurement, the domain miners dominated after 2017, is now being absorbed by AI data center developers with access to sovereign-backed capital and federal land. Miners who pivoted to HPC hosting in 2024 understood this early; those who didn’t are now competing for power contracts against counterparties who can commit $4.2 billion in transmission infrastructure alongside a single lease. The Dominion Energy figure in the source, contracted data center capacity up 88% from mid-2024 levels, reflects how quickly utility planning horizons have shifted.
The first gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform at the Ohio site is targeted for the second half of 2026, which means the buildout timeline, not just the announcement, is now concrete enough to affect grid planning, power pricing, and competing infrastructure investment decisions across the next 18 months.
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