Chip-making giant Nvidia will provide up to $105 billion in financing toward a massive AI data center in Ohio that will be leased by Sam Altman’s OpenAI and is expected to be one of the largest of its kind in the world, the companies announced Monday.
OpenAI has inked a 20-year deal for the site, which will ultimately provide about eight gigawatts of computing capacity that will help support products like ChatGPT, the companies said. In energy terms, a single gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes.
“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,” Altman said in a statement.
OpenAI said the data center project is “expected to create 35,000 construction jobs during its six-year buildout through 2032 and 2,500 long-term operating jobs.”
Nvidia will serve as the exclusive computer chip provider for the facility, to be located in Ohio’s Pike County. The first 800 megawatts of “compute” is expected to be available for use by 2028.
As part of the arrangement, Nvidia is also pouring $1.5 billion into SB Energy, a data center firm that’s a subsidiary of Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank.
“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,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release.
The company has come under scrutiny for providing funding for AI labs even as those companies buy its expensive AI computer chips and other data center-related infrastructure.
Huang said the arrangement was not a form of “circular financing” and noted that OpenAI would pay the lease. Nvidia’s financing will backstop “defined portions of lease and power payments” rather than the full cost of the project, he added.
In all, OpenAI’s commitments to buy Nvidia hardware and compute capacity will reach $600 billion by 2030, according to Huang.
The Ohio project will be closely watched on Wall Street, where investors have grown increasingly concerned about the huge sums being paid by AI firms as they race to develop advanced AI.
Other critics have focused on the huge energy demands associated with AI models and raised concerns that soaring costs will be passed on to ordinary Americans. Recent months have seen a series of headline-grabbing anti-data center protests, though more than half of Americans have a favorable view toward artificial intelligence, a survey found.
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