Nvidia investing $1.5B in SoftBank data center developer behind OpenAI project

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Nvidia is deepening its financial entanglement with the AI infrastructure stack by committing $1.5 billion to SB Energy, a data center developer backed by SoftBank and OpenAI. The investment secures Nvidia's position as the exclusive compute provider at OpenAI's Ports-Pike campus near Cincinnati, Ohio—built on former U.S. Department of Energy land that once enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and Navy submarines. The facility is planned to scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts to 8 gigawatts of compute capacity. To power it, SB Energy plans to build a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas plant projected to cost $33 billion—a figure reflecting a 66% surge in natural gas plant construction costs over two years, according to BloombergNEF. Nvidia is also providing up to $105 billion in credit to accelerate construction. The structure mirrors Nvidia's other recent investments: equity stakes that simultaneously guarantee hardware demand. SoftBank had previously held $5.8 billion in Nvidia stock, selling in November to fund other AI investments—making this a complex set of circular financial relationships across the AI infrastructure ecosystem. Long-run operating cost risk is real: when these plants come online, competition with LNG export markets could triple natural gas prices regionally, adding uncertainty to a capital plan that already runs into the trillions.