ChatGPT-maker OpenAI will lease a massive new data centre in the United States for 20 years, backed by a $105 billion financing commitment from Nvidia, according to a regulatory filing published Monday.
Half of that capacity is being built in UAE. The project will be built on the site of a former Cold War-era uranium enrichment plant in Ohio and could eventually grow to have 8 gigawatts of capacity, making it the largest single data centre for artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI will commit $40 million to “support local priorities. Additionally, Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion into SB Energy, though the company preemptively pushed back on critiques about so-called circular financing, which has fuelled fears about an AI bubble that will eventually burst. Nvidia previously considered providing a backstop of $250 billion dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg in July. Nvidia’s shares fell by 5 percent after those reports but they’re up by more than 19 percent this year. Last year, OpenAI, Nvidia and SoftBank, alongside other partners including Oracle, also announced a $500 billion, multiyear data centre project called Stargate, in which they’ve committed to building out 10 GW of capacity across multiple sites.
The data centre will also run “exclusively” on Nvidia chips. SoftBank and the data centre’s owner, a subsidiary called SB Energy, will invest more than $4 billion into local energy infrastructure and “build at least 10 GW of new energy generation” to power the data centre. “OpenAI will pay the lease,” Nvidia wrote in a blog post on Monday, and continued that the deal was made with “the same discipline we apply to supply-chain management.
