NVIDIA is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy, SoftBank's energy arm, and providing credit support of up to $105 billion tied to a 20-year OpenAI lease, according to TechCrunch, reported by Tim De Chant. The site is the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio: 3,700 acres of federal land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War uranium enrichment facility that stopped operating in 2001, developed by SB Energy under a partnership with the Department of Energy. Phase one is 4.25 gigawatts of IT capacity, NVIDIA holds an option covering another 3.75 gigawatts, and full buildout is 8 gigawatts. Behind it sits 9.2 gigawatts of on-site natural gas generation costing roughly $33 billion, built to stay off the existing grid. Reuters and the New York Times reported the deal the same day, and Nippon.com carried the SoftBank side.
4.25 gigawatts of IT load is about 14.5 billion BTU per hour that has to leave the property, roughly 1.2 million tons of refrigeration. At 8 gigawatts it is 2.3 million tons. For scale, a large hospital campus runs a few thousand tons. No operating data center campus in the United States is within an order of magnitude of this. The cooling architecture is the single largest engineering decision on the project and not one of the announcements names it: no supply temperature, no rejection scheme, no water balance, no PUE target. At AI rack density the liquid question is already settled, and commissioning risk concentrates in the cooling system even at 100MW, which is a fortieth of phase one.
If the 9.2 gigawatts of generation is sized against the 8 gigawatts of IT at full buildout, the implied overhead is about 15 percent, which puts the target PUE near 1.15. That is an inference from two published numbers rather than a stated figure, and it is worth stating because 1.15 across 2.3 million tons does not close with mechanical chillers running through an Ohio summer. It closes with liquid at the rack, a high supply temperature, and dry coolers doing the rejection for most of the year. The 45C loop that eliminates the chiller plant is NVIDIA's own reference design, and NVIDIA is the exclusive compute supplier here.
Gaseous diffusion was among the most electricity-intensive industrial processes ever operated at scale, and the compressor trains that ran it needed continuous cooling and enormous electrical service. That is the reason a decommissioned enrichment plant is attractive: federal land with an industrial power and water footprint already established and already permitted. Whether any of that cooling infrastructure survived decommissioning is not something the announcements address, and it is the first question worth asking. Brownfield reuse keeps beating greenfield on schedule for exactly this reason, at a fraction of this scale.
One more thing sits on top of it. Conserve Ohio missed the 2026 ballot with its 25 megawatt data center ban and is aiming at 2027, which means an 8,000 megawatt campus and a 25 megawatt cap are now heading for the same electorate in the same state. The signature count fell short in June. Nothing about a federal site insulates a project from that, and off-grid gas is drawing scrutiny faster than the permits are moving. Anyone selling into this campus should be asking SB Energy for the design wet bulb, the makeup water source, and the supply temperature now, because those three numbers determine the entire mechanical scope and none of them are public.