OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease for an 8-gigawatt data centre in southern Ohio, built on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. Nvidia is guaranteeing up to $105 billion of the financing and putting $1.5 billion into SB Energy, the SoftBank-founded developer behind it, in exchange for being the exclusive chip supplier.
What this changes for your website: nothing this week, or this year.
The facility is expected to produce 800 megawatts by 2028 and isn't fully built until the 2030s. Nothing about your contact form, your booking system or your Google rankings shifts because of a construction announcement in Pike County.
Why it's still worth two minutes of your attention.
If you pay for anything that uses AI (a writing assistant, a chatbot on your site, an AI feature bundled into your scheduling or invoicing software), this is the plumbing underneath it. Right now those tools are cheap, sometimes free, because the companies selling them are buying market share. This deal is one of the reasons why they can afford to.
But note the detail from the reporting: nine tech companies are now carrying roughly $3 trillion in AI commitments that don't show up on their balance sheets. That's a lot of money that has to be earned back eventually. The historical pattern with infrastructure this expensive is that prices to the customer stay low for a while, then don't.
The practical risk for a small business isn't cost, it's dependency. If you've built something into your day-to-day operations that only works because a particular AI service exists at a particular price, you've made a bet on someone else's business model. That's fine, as long as you know you've made it.
What to do.
Make a short list of every AI-powered tool you currently rely on, and next to each one write what you'd do if it doubled in price or shut down tomorrow. If the answer for any of them is "I have no idea," that's the one to talk to your developer about. Ask specifically whether your data comes back out in a usable form if you leave.
Otherwise, carry on.
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