OpenAI to build large Ohio data center under 10-year lease, with NVIDIA-backed financing guarantee

OpenAI said it has agreed to a 10-year lease for a large data center in central Ohio, outlining a construction timeline that it expects will generate substantial near-term employment and longer-term operations roles. In an announcement reported by Yahoo Finance, OpenAI said the project is designed to expand the infrastructure needed to support its AI workloads and delivery requirements.

The company said the arrangement includes financing support partly guaranteed by NVIDIA. While the disclosure did not provide additional details in the reported item about the structure of the guarantee, it linked NVIDIA to the financing side of the buildout, suggesting NVIDIA’s role is aimed at reducing capital-market uncertainty for large-scale capacity expansion.

OpenAI put job creation figures around the project, stating it expects 35,000 construction jobs tied to the build. It also projected 2,500 permanent operating positions once the data center is running, framing the initiative as both an infrastructure effort and a regional economic development project.

Data centers are the physical backbone of modern AI systems, housing servers, networking equipment, cooling hardware, and power delivery. As AI adoption increases, companies have increasingly focused on securing long-duration leases and large capital commitments to lock in power, land, and grid interconnection timelines, which can be the critical bottleneck in scaling compute.

For NVIDIA, the deal is consistent with a recurring theme in its market position: it sells the GPUs and accelerated computing platforms that data centers use to run training and inference workloads. When an AI customer ties expansion plans to NVIDIA-linked financing or commitments, it can serve as a proxy announcement that demand for high-performance compute remains strong and that suppliers are working to align capital planning with hardware roadmaps.

At the same time, the reported announcement leaves open several details that investors and customers usually scrutinize in large capacity deals. The disclosure did not specify the projected power capacity of the Ohio facility, the anticipated number of servers or GPUs, the expected ramp period, or whether OpenAI plans to run all workloads internally or through a broader customer-sharing model.

It also did not spell out the geographic and technical constraints that often drive data center decisions, including grid availability, whether the site will include dedicated substations or generation arrangements, and what cooling approach it will use. Those elements can materially affect costs and timelines, particularly in regions with constrained power delivery capacity.

Looking ahead, the next checkpoints for the story are likely to be any additional filing or permitting updates tied to the lease and construction start, plus any more detailed disclosures on how the project’s capacity will map to specific hardware configurations. For now, the most concrete information is the decade-long lease framing, the NVIDIA-linked financing guarantee, and OpenAI’s stated employment projections for the Ohio build.