Saturday, the PORTS-Pike data center was still a story about Nvidia maybe putting up to $3 billion into SB Energy, half at signing and half at the IPO. By Monday morning it was signed, the equity was $1.5 billion, and an 8-K put the credit support at up to $105 billion. That is a fast week even by 2026 standards, and the gap between those two numbers is where the interesting part lives.

Here is the shape of what got signed. SB Energy builds, owns, and operates the campus on and around the old Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio. OpenAI leases it for twenty years and is the only tenant. Nvidia is the exclusive compute provider, deploying its DSX rack architecture, and backstops the land, power, and shell buildout for an initial 4.25 IT-gigawatts with an option on the remaining 3.75. Capacity phases in from 2028. SoftBank and SB Energy build at least 10 GW of new generation to feed 8 IT-GW of usable AI factory capacity.

It is the same vendor-financing machine I picked apart when the $500 billion Wall Street consortium story broke last week, except now there is a site, a tenant, a lease term, and a filing. The company selling the accelerators is underwriting the landlord that houses them for the customer that rents them, and it took an equity stake in the landlord along the way.

The clause nobody puts in the headline

Jensen Huang was unusually specific about the limits on LinkedIn, and I think that was deliberate after the investor pushback that dragged the backstop down from the $250 billion floated in July. Nvidia’s support covers defined portions of lease and power payments plus what he called a specified residual-value commitment. The guarantee switches on in phases as buildings enter service between 2028 and 2030, and Nvidia’s exposure declines as OpenAI actually pays.

Residual value is the clause I keep rereading. Nvidia is not only promising a lender that rent will come in. It is promising that if OpenAI walks, the site is still worth a floor price. That is the risk a data center developer normally carries alone, and it is the reason SB Energy can borrow against a tenant whose lease payments depend on ChatGPT revenue that has not been earned yet. OpenAI said plainly that it starts paying only as completed capacity becomes available and will fund those commitments from business growth and capital it has not raised.

The $3 billion becoming $1.5 billion also got reported as a retreat, and I don’t read it that way. The second tranche was always attached to SB Energy’s IPO, which The Information said could come as soon as September at a raise of at least $5 billion. Nvidia writing a $1.5 billion anchor check into that book is not a smaller commitment; it is the same commitment waiting for a share price. The shrinking backstop is the real concession, and it looks like the version that survived contact with actual lenders rather than a change of heart.

Ten gigawatts, and Tokyo funds nine of them

The generation side surprised me most, and almost nobody covering the Nvidia number touched it. Of the 10 GW planned, 9.2 GW is natural gas, funded in part through the US-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement at $33.3 billion, and the United States government will own the plants. Federal land, Japanese capital, Japanese developer, American public ownership of the turbines, a Silicon Valley tenant, and a chip vendor guaranteeing the rent. I have written about a lot of odd AI infrastructure capital stacks this year, and I have not seen one arranged quite like that.

On transmission, the numbers are cleaner than usual. SB Energy pays 100% of the $4.2 billion in new 765 kV lines that AEP Ohio will build, with power expected to flow in 2029, and the stated point is that Ohio transmission ratepayers do not fund the interconnection for a private load. That matters, given the last five years in Ohio, when the average bill climbed more than 53% between June 2021 and June 2026. It is also the specific thing the PUCO has been chasing all year, most recently in an August 5 order forcing AEP Ohio to buy power separately for any data center that drops back to default service and assign the entire cost to that customer.

What the ratepayer framing does not answer is generation. Nine gigawatts of gas connected to the local grid is not a private island; it is fuel-price exposure and a capacity market participant that has sat in southern Ohio for decades. Compare it to the nuclear timeline everyone was excited about last summer, where the SMR announcements mostly resolve into the 2030s and gas quietly does the actual work, and PORTS-Pike is that trade made explicit at national scale. I am not getting into the emissions math on 9.2 GW of new combustion here; that deserves its own post and a better dataset than a press release.

Water, for once, looks like the least alarming line item. The cooling is closed-loop and air-cooled rather than evaporative; it leans on DOE’s existing onsite water system, and OpenAI claims steady-state use lands near an office building with similar headcount once the loop is filled. I will take that seriously when the promised public report on expected use actually lands.

Where the money doesn’t go

Now the part that made me put my coffee down. The land belongs to the Department of Energy, so there is no property tax on the federal footprint. Ohio does not tax tangible personal property, so the several hundred thousand GPUs that will cycle through this campus every few years never appear on a local tax roll. Loudoun County in Virginia expects on the order of $800 million a year from exactly that tax. Pike County’s equivalent is zero, by design, and it was zero before anyone at SoftBank drew a site plan.

On top of that sits Ohio’s data center sales tax exemption under R.C. 122.175, which waives state and local sales tax on equipment and construction materials for projects clearing $100 million in capex and $1.5 million in payroll. Data centers have claimed somewhere around $2.5 billion in Ohio breaks since 2017. The legislature voted to kill the exemption in the last budget, and DeWine vetoed the provision; then, in June, he paused new approvals days after the Tax Credit Authority waved through $42.3 million for a pair of Cologix projects. Nobody has said publicly whether PORTS-Pike will claim it. Nobody has said it won’t, either.

So the community’s actual take is the negotiated number: $40 million from SB Energy, matched by $40 million from OpenAI, for $80 million against a buildout the Journal pegged at half a trillion dollars for the full 10 GW. OpenAI’s press number is $164 million for Ohio, which gets there by adding $84 million of Codex credits at $100 per college student. Product credits are marketing spend. They are not revenue for a county; they do not repave a road, and folding them into a community investment headline annoys me more than the underlying deal does.

Jobs are the strongest column in the ledger, and I want to be fair about it. 35,000 construction jobs across a six-year buildout through 2032, then 2,500 long-term operating roles, in a county that ran 4.8% unemployment in June, fifth worst of Ohio’s 88. Two thousand five hundred permanent jobs at a single site is a serious number for southern Ohio, and it is roughly the headcount the enrichment plant and its cleanup have sustained for years. The building trades understood this before the tech press did.

Pike County has been here before

This site was available because it was ruined. Portsmouth enriched uranium from 1954 until 2001; decontamination started in 2011 and is not finished, and the campus footprint sits on the cleaner parts of a 3,777-acre property that still holds groundwater contamination, asbestos, and enrichment residues.

That history is not background color to the people who live there. Zahn’s Corner Middle School closed abruptly in May 2019 after transuranic contamination turned up in monitoring near the school; litigation over childhood cancers is still live, and Ohio’s 2025 cancer report puts Pike County among the state’s worst at 544.4 deaths per 100,000. Dozens of nearby homes were found to have unsafe contamination levels, and people still live in them. Jennifer Chandler, who chairs the Scioto Valley-Piketon area council of governments, has been pushing to include residents in federal radiation exposure compensation while also arguing that reindustrializing the site is the most likely way to fund relocating or remediating those properties.

Both are true at once, and that is why the local politics here look nothing like the data center fights everywhere else. Piketon is not asking whether it wants heavy industry. It has had heavy industry; it was poisoned by heavy industry; the cleanup is currently the largest employer; and the choice on offer is a different industrial tenant rather than a park. Compare that to Chicago, where the mayor’s data center executive order does not even define a data center and got used as a community guarantee anyway, and you can see how much the site’s history changes the negotiating table. Pike County starts from a weaker position and, oddly, extracts a clearer set of commitments.

The template other states will copy badly

Ohio spent 2026 failing to legislate this. A bipartisan ratepayer bill would have forced twelve-year service agreements and blocked cost shifting onto other customer classes. A study commission passed the House. Lawmakers reached no agreement in June. The citizen amendment to ban construction of any data center above 25 MW needed 413,488 valid signatures by July 1, gathered somewhere north of 70,000, and now aims for the 2027 ballot with signatures that do not expire. Meanwhile, the PUCO kept writing rate-class rules, and the country’s biggest project got signed on federal land, where local zoning has nothing to say.

That last detail is the one every governor will notice. The DOE site list that put Portsmouth in play has fifteen other entries. Federal land plus a foreign trade agreement plus a vendor guarantee plus a developer-funded interconnection is a structure that routes around exactly the local veto points that killed or slowed projects elsewhere. What will not travel is the part that made Pike County say yes: the sunk industrial history, the existing water and power infrastructure, and a community that has already paid the environmental price and would like something back for it. Copy the financing without the context, and you get the Ohio backlash without the Ohio consent.

I keep coming back to the same asymmetry. The federal government contributed the land and will own the gas plants, Japan contributed $33.3 billion, Nvidia contributed a residual-value floor worth up to $105 billion, and the county that hosts all of it contributed a poisoned 3,777 acres and will collect $80 million plus payroll. The one number I want to see before I judge whether this was a good trade is whatever Pike County’s schools actually receive in the first full year of operation. If it is a rounding error against a half-trillion-dollar campus, the 2027 ballot fight writes itself.

Sources

  • NVIDIA newsroom / SEC Form 8-K, “NVIDIA Guarantees SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Ohio to Exclusively Host NVIDIA AI Compute,” Aug 17, 2026: nvidianews.nvidia.com
  • OpenAI, “OpenAI joins PORTS-Pike project,” Aug 17, 2026: openai.com
  • The Information, “Nvidia in Talks to Invest $3 Billion in SB Energy as Part of OpenAI Data Center Deal,” Aug 15, 2026: theinformation.com
  • Data Center Dynamics, “Nvidia confirms it will back 4.25GW of OpenAI capacity at Ports-Pike mega data center,” Aug 17, 2026: datacenterdynamics.com
  • U.S. Department of Energy, “Energy Department Announces Partnership to Ensure Affordable Energy and Power America’s AI Future,” Mar 20, 2026: energy.gov
  • AEP Ohio, “$4.2B in New Electric Infrastructure in Appalachian Ohio Without Raising Customer Rates,” Mar 20, 2026: aep.com
  • WOUB, “A company’s plan for a massive data center complex in Pike County includes private land as well,” Jun 15, 2026: woub.org
  • Policy Matters Ohio, “Indefensible tax breaks for data centers will cost Ohio”: policymattersohio.org
  • NBC4 / WCMH, “We’re dying: Pike County residents balance new nuclear jobs with past radiation,” Jul 2026: nbc4i.com
  • Ohio Capital Journal, “Ohio proposed constitutional amendment to ban data centers will not be on this year’s ballot,” Jun 19, 2026: ohiocapitaljournal.com
  • Spectrum News 1, “PUCO orders AEP Ohio to set protections for Ohioans against data center energy costs,” Aug 5, 2026: spectrumnews1.com