Did This Sprawling Nvidia-Backed Project Address Everyone’s Concerns About Data Centers?

OpenAI announced a 20-year lease on a massive data center in Ohio that seeks to create jobs, cover electricity costs and just maybe address everyone’s concerns about such centers.

The Ohio data center may become one of the world’s largest, as it could cost as much as $500 billion and generate up to eight gigawatts of computing power, which amounts to roughly enough electricity to power about six million households, per the New York Times. The data center will create 35,000 construction jobs during its six year construction period until 2032 and create 2,500 long-term operating jobs, according to an OpenAI press release.

One expert says that a data center project such as this should alleviate skeptics’ concerns.

“I’m surprised that there’s any opposition to a project like this because these are all the supposed concerns people who want moratoriums on data centers have—water usage, power usage, rates, all of that is addressed in this,” Chris Johnson, the president of the American Energy Leadership Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“After 40 years of promises, SE Ohio is finally getting a development on the Piketon uranium site, and it is an historic one,” Republican Senator Bernie Moreno wrote in a Monday X post.

The AI giant said it will establish a $40 million grant fund on top of SB Energy’s $40 million commitment. The data center aims to combat most Americans’ concerns with data centers. Additionally, the company will provide $84 million in Codex credits, or tokens to use for ChaptGPT coding.

OpenAI views this project as another opportunity to establish 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,” OpenAI wrote in a press release.

“Now is the time to scale the AI infrastructure that will power the next industrial revolution. We are securing long-lived infrastructure for Nvidia compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories that can be upgraded repeatedly with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a Monday press release.

The sprawling data center project aims to alleviate common issues Americans have with data centers.

SB Energy, owned by Japanese investment firm SoftBank, will pay the full cost of the grid and transmission line upgrades necessary to serve the data centers and Ohioans will not pay the electricity cost either, according to a Monday OpenAI press release. The data center will recirculate water to reduce ongoing water demand. State and local government will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue over the data center’s operation, which will aid public schools, roads, public safety and other public priorities.

“This is going to be a huge site, with enough computing power to help millions of people use AI to do things we can only start to imagine today, from finding new medicines to starting businesses and solving hard problems,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said in the Monday press release. “We’re proud to build it in Pike County, a place that is once again at the heart of American industry and leading the future. We want the people who live here to feel the benefits too, through good jobs, more opportunity for local businesses, and investment in the community for years to come.”

Nvidia will exclusively provide the chips and guarantee up to $105 billion on the conditional lease and power obligations to SB Energy.

Nvidia will back the asset value of the data center instead of OpenAI’s lease payments, which limits the chipmaker’s risk exposure, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the deal.

Huang disputed claims that this deal amounts to “circular financing” because “OpenAI will pay the lease.”

Many recent AI financial deals have become “circular.” For instance, OpenAI has received billions of dollars from tech companies that send those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services, according to the New York Times.

Tech giants announced the sprawling data center at a time that Texas announced its moratorium on data center development. Americans have frowned on data centers in the state and nationally.