OpenAI in Final Talks to Lease $500 Billion, 10-Gigawatt AI Data Center Campus in Ohio

OpenAI is in late-stage talks to lease a 10-gigawatt artificial intelligence data center campus being developed in Ohio, The Information reported on June 9.

The project includes a plan for Nvidia to provide a direct payment guarantee, the publication reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The campus is being built on federal land and would be the largest facility of its kind ever developed.

The project is expected to cost at least $500 billion, including semiconductors, labor, power equipment and materials.

OpenAI plans to operate the campus under a long-term lease. Once construction is completed, the company would oversee operations and take on financial obligations including lease payments from the start of commercial operations. The first phase is targeted to begin operating in 2028.

If completed, the deal would mark OpenAI's largest in-house infrastructure project to date, The Information said. The company has mainly relied on infrastructure leased from hyperscalers such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to develop and run advanced AI models, while also working to build infrastructure it can fully control.

The project also entangles SoftBank, a major OpenAI shareholder, and Nvidia, another strategic investor in the company. The site is owned by the US Department of Energy, and SB Energy, a company majority-owned by SoftBank, is participating in the development.

OpenAI plans to install Nvidia's latest AI equipment at the campus. Nvidia is also considering payment guarantees not only for OpenAI's lease obligations but also for SB Energy's project financing, the report said.

Such a move would be unusual for Nvidia. The company has repeatedly expressed a willingness to support financing for customers building data centers with its chips, but it has never directly guaranteed a project worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Many in the industry view the move as an effort to counter Google, Nvidia's biggest rival in AI semiconductors. Google previously agreed to guarantee data center-related loans and lease payments for Anthropic on the condition that the startup buy its Tensor Processing Units.

The project stands to impose a heavy financial burden on OpenAI. People familiar with the matter said the cost of leasing the campus for 20 years would amount to at least tens of billions of dollars.

In addition, OpenAI may need to raise another $350 billion to secure AI infrastructure such as semiconductors and servers.

OpenAI is reviewing financing options to fund chip purchases, the report said, though it remains unclear whether outside parties such as Nvidia would provide support at that stage.

Those infrastructure costs are emerging as a major test of the financial health of AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic ahead of potential initial public offerings. OpenAI's existing lease obligations for AI infrastructure with cloud providers including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services already total at least $665 billion over the next five years.

Go Jeong-sam, Hankyung.com reporter, jsk@hankyung.com