The technology company Nvidia said Monday it has reached a lease agreement for “land, power and shell” or LPS facilities for an artificial intelligence (AI) data center at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio.
“Today, we are partnering with SB Energy to secure LPS capacity at the exceptional PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Portsmouth, Ohio, to host NVIDIA compute,” according to an Aug. 17 blog post by Nvidia. “OpenAI will be the tenant.”
While OpenAI will be the customer, “SB Energy will build, own and operate the data center under a 20-year lease to OpenAI,” SB Energy said in its own press release. The Nvidia investment is reportedly worth $1.5 billion.
“This is going to be a huge site, with enough computing power to help millions of people use AI to do things we can only start to imagine today, from finding new medicines to starting businesses and solving hard problems,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in an Nvidia press release. “We’re proud to build it in Pike County, a place that is once again at the heart of American industry and leading the future. We want the people who live here to feel the benefits too, through good jobs, more opportunity for local businesses, and investment in the community for years to come.”
In March, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the Department of Commerce announced the feds had reached agreement with companies such as SoftBank and American Electric Power (AEP) for the data center in Piketon, Ohio.
“NVIDIA is supporting the LPS infrastructure at PORTS-Pike for approximately 4 gigawatts over a 20-year term, securing a site on which NVIDIA compute will be exclusively deployed,” according to the blog by Nvidia founder Jensen Huang. “Our support is limited to defined portions of lease and power payments, along with a specified residual-value commitment — not the full cost of the site or all of the tenant’s obligations.”
“Each generation of NVIDIA AI factory systems deployed at PORTS-Pike could represent approximately 1.5 million NVIDIA GPUs, or approximately $150 billion to $200 billion in NVIDIA revenue,” Huang said in the blog. “Over 20 years, the site can support multiple upgrade cycles.”
DOE and its corporate partners have been pursuing state permits from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.