OpenAI is pushing to lease a 10-gigawatt AI data centre in the U.S. state of Ohio. If a deal is reached, it is expected to be one of the largest AI computing infrastructure investments ever for a single site.

Cryptopolitan, a blockchain media outlet, reported on June 10 that the project is under discussion based on funding support from Nvidia.

A candidate site is the former Portsmouth gas diffusion plant site in Pike County, Ohio. The site is federal land, and the U.S. Department of Energy said in March 2026 it had announced redevelopment cooperation with SoftBank Group and its affiliate SB Energy. SB Energy plans to build new power-generation facilities with a capacity of 10 gigawatts there, with at least 9.2 gigawatts to be supplied by natural gas generation.

OpenAI's Stargate project has secured about 7 gigawatts of planned capacity as of September 2025 across 7 hubs including Abilene, Texas. If the Ohio Picketon campus materialises, the single site would exceed the total planned scale of the existing 7 hubs.

Comparisons are also clear. The total capacity of Northern Virginia in the United States, considered the world's largest concentration of data centres, was about 5 gigawatts as of 2025. Picketon is also structured to use nearly twice that amount of power at a single site compared with roughly 5 gigawatts secured at more than 50 locations worldwide after BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia and xAI acquired Aligned Data Centers in late 2025.

The discussions are an extension of the $500 billion Stargate programme announced at the White House in January 2025. OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank took part in the programme. OpenAI then expanded plans to 7 sites totalling about 7 gigawatts by September 2025, and also secured investment commitments of more than $400 billion over 3 years. If the Ohio site is added, it would become the state's second Stargate-linked hub. The existing hub is in Lordstown.

Nvidia plans to take part in funding support beyond supplying semiconductors. Nvidia and OpenAI signed a letter of intent in September 2025 to introduce at least 10 gigawatts worth of Nvidia systems, and Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI on the condition that facilities are brought online sequentially. The first 1 gigawatt is planned to be built in the second half of 2026 based on Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform.

Power infrastructure is also being expanded. SB Energy and AEP Ohio are pushing new transmission infrastructure worth $4.2 billion. The U.S. Department of Energy said it will allow surplus generation and transmission capacity to be provided to general consumers, and it also decided to bring forward environmental clean-up of the former uranium enrichment site.

The deal has not been finalised. For OpenAI to actually operate a 10-gigawatt data centre at a single site, it must overcome multiple tasks including power procurement, permitting and capital injection. The Stargate project is expanding faster than originally planned, but total cost projections exceed $1 trillion when factoring in OpenAI's cloud commitments mentioned by Sam Altman (샘 알트먼).

Ultimately, the key point to watch is whether OpenAI can take its mega AI campus strategy through to the operational stage. If the Ohio project materialises, AI competition will move further into an infrastructure contest combining power, sites, transmission grids and capital-raising capacity, beyond model performance.