Nvidia to Invest $1.5 Billion in SB Energy, Securing Sole Compute Supplier Role at OpenAI's Ports-Pike Facility
Nvidia announced on August 17, 2026 that it will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a data center developer linked to SoftBank and OpenAI. The investment secures Nvidia as the sole supplier of compute infrastructure at OpenAI's planned Ports-Pike data center near Cincinnati, Ohio, where it will provide up to $105 billion in credit to help build the facility. Nvidia will secure up to 8 gigawatts of AI computing capacity at the Ohio campus under the arrangement TechCrunch Reuters.
SB Energy, whose existing investors include SoftBank and OpenAI, will construct a 9.2 gigawatt natural gas power plant on the data center site. The site sits on land owned by the U.S. Department of Energy that previously enriched uranium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and for Navy submarines. The power plant carries an expected cost of $33 billion TechCrunch.
The Ports-Pike facility could scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts to 8 gigawatts in size. This Ohio build is part of the broader Stargate initiative. SoftBank and OpenAI each committed $19 billion to fund the Stargate data center joint venture, a project that intends to invest $500 billion over four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI Reuters SoftBank. In September 2025, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced five new U.S. AI data center sites under the Stargate project, with over $400 billion in investment planned over three years and a full $500 billion program SoftBank Reuters. The international footprint extends to Stargate UAE, launched by SoftBank's Global Tech Alliance to provide 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity powered by nuclear, solar, and other sources SoftBank.
Prior to this finalized $1.5 billion commitment, reporting indicated Nvidia was in talks to invest as much as $3 billion in SB Energy and to provide a roughly $250 billion financial backstop for OpenAI to lease the Ohio project The Information WSJ. SoftBank separately committed to investing $3 billion in an Ohio factory for an OpenAI data center Reuters, and announced a $22.5 billion investment plan in OpenAI in August 2025 SoftBank. SoftBank funded these AI investments partly by liquidating its entire stake in Nvidia, selling $5.8 billion in stock in November 2025 CNBC.
Nvidia and OpenAI formalized a strategic partnership in September 2025 to deploy 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems. Under that agreement, Nvidia intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed Nvidia.
The financial architecture taking shape around the Ports-Pike campus carries distinct implications for vendor and counterparty risk in the AI infrastructure supply chain.
Looking at what this means for infrastructure economics, the decision to anchor a flagship AI data center on 9.2 gigawatts of natural gas generation occurs amid a shifting cost environment. The cost of building natural gas power plants has risen 66% in the last two years, according to BloombergNEF TechCrunch. Forecasts suggest the confluence of new gas power plants and export markets could triple natural gas prices in some parts of the United States TechCrunch. Committing tens of billions of dollars to gas-fired generation locks operators into fuel price trajectories that may diverge from expectations.
Worth flagging is the circularity of capital in this arrangement. SoftBank sold its Nvidia shares to fund AI infrastructure ventures like Stargate and OpenAI. Nvidia is now taking an equity stake in SB Energy and extending massive credit to OpenAI, effectively recycling capital through a chain of interdependent entities. Nvidia's willingness to act as both vendor and financier of last resort for its largest customers concentrates operational and financial risk on its own balance sheet.
The Ohio site selection carries its own layer of complexity. Building a hyperscale AI facility and a massive gas power plant on former Department of Energy nuclear enrichment land layers regulatory and environmental oversight onto an already intricate development timeline. Site remediation, security clearances, and federal land-use negotiations are distinct variables from standard greenfield data center construction.
Over the long arc, the demand for inference capacity and model training at this scale is real. The industry has weathered infrastructure buildouts before, during the cloud transitions of the 2010s and the mobile network expansion before that. What differs now is the vertical integration of compute supply, facility ownership, power generation, and end-use model deployment within a small group of counterparties. The Ports-Pike project will be an early test of whether that tightly coupled financial and operational model can deliver on its capacity targets.
