The site is a Cold War uranium enrichment plant. OpenAI announced Monday it has signed a 20-year lease for capacity at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, on Department of Energy land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, securing roughly 8 gigawatts of IT capacity. SB Energy builds, owns and operates it, with phased delivery starting in 2028 and running through 2032.
The 35,000 number and what’s behind it
OpenAI puts the construction workforce at 35,000 jobs across the six-year buildout, with 2,500 permanent operating roles afterward. That’s the company’s own projection and it should be read as one. Still, the scale is worth sitting with: Ohio’s entire construction sector employs somewhere around a quarter of a million people. A single campus claiming 35,000 construction jobs is claiming a meaningful share of a state’s available trades capacity, concentrated in a rural county of roughly 27,000 residents.
The company also committed $40 million in community investment on top of the $40 million SB Energy had already pledged.
Nvidia’s $105 billion is a ceiling, not capex
The same day, Nvidia disclosed in a securities filing that it will guarantee up to $105 billion of conditional lease and power-payment obligations to SB Energy, covering an initial 4.25 GW with an option on another 3.75 GW. It’s separately investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy. That guarantee ceiling is not committed capital expenditure, and the distinction matters for anyone pricing risk on the job. What it does is make SB Energy financeable at a scale it could not reach alone.
No contractor has been named
Six days after the announcement there is still no general contractor, EPC or named trade partner on the public record. That’s a real reporting hole, not an oversight on our end. For a project this size, the procurement structure tells you more than the gigawatt figure does, and it hasn’t been disclosed.
The one commitment that should get more attention than it has: SB Energy is to pay the full cost of grid upgrades and new transmission rather than shifting it to ratepayers. Texas froze 49.8 gigawatts of interconnection requests earlier this month over exactly this question, and utility commissions across the Midwest are watching who pays for the wires.
Ohio has been through a version of this before. The Portsmouth site has absorbed federal cleanup money for decades. Whether a hyperscale campus is a better second act than a decommissioned enrichment plant is not really in dispute; whether 35,000 trades workers exist within commuting distance of Piketon is a separate question, and it’s the one the schedule depends on. Compare the labor math at the Hanwha Philly Shipyard expansion, where a $5 billion industrial buildout has doubled its workforce and still isn’t close to its target.