Nvidia Puts $1.5B Into SoftBank's OpenAI Data Center Site

Nvidia is putting $1.5 billion into SB Energy, the SoftBank- and OpenAI-linked data center developer building the Ports-Pike site near Cincinnati, Ohio — and locking in exclusive rights to supply it.

Nvidia said Monday the investment makes it the sole supplier of compute infrastructure at the site, according to SEC filings the company disclosed. Beyond the equity stake, Nvidia is providing up to $105 billion in credit to help build the facility.

A data center that can double in size

Ports-Pike is planned to start at 4.25 gigawatts and scale up to 8 gigawatts, per the filings. SB Energy's existing investors already include both SoftBank and OpenAI — SoftBank had previously held $5.8 billion worth of Nvidia stock, which it sold in November to fund other AI investments, making this new $1.5 billion stake something of a reversal in direction.

The power problem underneath the compute story

Feeding that much compute requires its own power buildout: SB Energy plans a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas power plant on the same site, expected to cost $33 billion. That figure reflects a broader trend — natural gas power plant construction costs have risen 66% over the last two years, according to BloombergNEF.

The site itself has a layered history: it sits on land owned by the U.S. Department of Energy that previously enriched uranium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and for U.S. Navy submarines.

Why it matters beyond this one deal

SB Energy's plant will be competing for natural gas supply with export markets once it and similar facilities come online — a confluence that could triple natural gas prices in parts of the country, by one estimate cited in the reporting. That's the pattern worth watching across the current AI buildout: compute investment announcements increasingly come bundled with power infrastructure commitments large enough to move regional energy markets on their own.

Figure	Amount
Nvidia equity investment	$1.5 billion
Nvidia credit line	Up to $105 billion
Planned data center scale	4.25 GW → 8 GW
On-site power plant cost	$33 billion (9.2 GW)
Natural gas plant cost rise (2 yrs)	66%

Nothing here changes what OpenAI ships this week, but it's a concrete marker of how much fixed infrastructure is now being committed years ahead of the models that will run on it — worth tracking alongside any GPU or model announcement from the same ecosystem.

For anyone modeling AI infrastructure costs, the split matters: the headline number is the $1.5 billion equity check, but the $105 billion credit line and $33 billion power plant are the figures that actually determine whether Ports-Pike gets built on schedule. Compute capacity and power capacity are being financed as two separate, equally large bets here, not one.