Powerstack: OpenAI gets speedy review in Ohio

Currence’s new Q3 2026 Data Center Outlook found that hyperscaler capex increase is more about component inflation than a signal for more AI capacity coming online in today’s market. Five hyperscalers are on track to spend close to $790bn on capex this year, roughly double their combined 2025 total, and Amazon's entire $20bn guidance raise came down to memory prices alone. The full report is out today, and it also digs into why turbine lead times have doubled since 2022 and what that means for the rest of the buildout. Download it here. Clients can get the full version here.

And speaking of hyperscalers, the US government is starting to look like one. I’m digging into the new planned OpenAI data center on federal land and the massive plant powering it below.

This is Currence’s weekly newsletter on the moves and motives shaping the load growth era. Not a client yet?

What happened

This week, OpenAI confirmed it will anchor 8GW of the PORTS-Pike data center campus in Pike County, Ohio. The DOE and the Commerce Department announced this data center campus in March, part of a public-private partnership with SoftBank and AEP Ohio. SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy will build, own, and operate the data center, then lease it to OpenAI for 20 years. Nvidia is backstopping up to $105bn in lease and power payments, owed only if OpenAI defaults, and also serving as the exclusive on-site compute provider.

Powering this is a planned 9.2GW natural gas plant, built and owned by the US government, sited adjacent to the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. It’s a decommissioned federal facility that enriched uranium for weapons during the Cold War and afterwards for commercial nuclear reactor fuel until 2001, and remains under active decontamination and cleanup. By generating capacity, this new plant would surpass Washington state's Grand Coulee Dam to become the largest power plant in the country, of any fuel type, and one of the largest gas plants in the world. That comes with a big price tag, $33.3bn, funded through the US-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement, first struck in July 2025.

According to filings, the gas plant will be built in phases. The first tranche of generation, for up to 2GW of the total 9.2GW, is planned to start construction in Q1 2027 and reach commercial operation by Q3 2028. That's distinct from the data center's own first 800MW, targeted for 2028 largely on existing AEP grid capacity rather than new generation.

Power plants this size don't get built just anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Because it sits partly on federal land, the project goes through NEPA review (Currence client access), with the Army Corps of Engineers as lead federal agency. In June, it surfaced in the federal FAST-41 permitting dashboard, the first project in the "high-performance computing" sector to get that status. (FAST-41 has covered energy, transportation, pipelines, and manufacturing projects since it was created in 2015, but high-performance computing and AI/ML were added in 2022). FAST-41 assigns a dedicated coordinator and a public timeline across agencies, but it doesn't waive any environmental law. 

And this plant’s public timeline is unusually short. It shows that the paperwork was first filed in May, review opened July 10, and the target completion is December 23, about seven months for what would be the largest fossil fuel power project ever reviewed under NEPA. Wild.

That seven-month window is possible partly because of what a Heatmap investigation revealed: the project is getting an Environmental Assessment, the shorter, less rigorous tier of NEPA review, instead of the Environmental Impact Statement a project of this size and consequence would typically require. 

Other pieces of the review are still incomplete or not public. Air permitting doesn't appear as a review step on the FAST-41 dashboard at all, and Ohio EPA, which normally handles Clean Air Act permitting for a plant like this, hadn't published anything project-specific as of Heatmap's reporting. A separate May 28 filing tied to the private portion of the site flagged potential wetland and stream impacts, requiring both a state water-quality certification and a federal Army Corps permit, but the filing itself includes two competing site layouts.

Mark’s take

We wrote about this project earlier this year, mostly commenting on how it will contribute to a crowding out effect for gas turbines, forcing hyperscalers into a position of acting as a reliability provider, or a utility.

For this project, as with a lot of the discourse around data centers generally, it centers on the supply tightness, public and political opposition, and any other reason why a data center won’t reach the finish line. We of course have added to this. Most of the coverage I’ve seen this week lists reasons this project doesn't happen – the compressed review, the unexplained Environmental Assessment, the contamination all leading to public opposition or legal challenge.

Tempting. But on this one I’ll actually take the other side. I think this thing gets built.

And it’s not really because of the compressed environmental review. First, it appears to have its power equipment sewn up. Second, and this is the one I want to comment on, is this 2021 Ohio state law, SB 52. 

SB 52 gave county commissioners a veto over new utility-scale wind and solar. But it doesn’t give them any say about gas, coal, nuclear, or transmission. Only the Ohio Power Siting Board has approval power for those. So local opposition would have to convince OPSB to reject this project. This has happened before for solar – where public opposition has gone to OPSB and got them to reject project applications (for projects that were grandfathered in and meant to be immune to SB 52). Opposition can still show up, and can still intervene in the OPSB docket. What it can't do is kill this before the board ever sees it, the way a county resolution can with a wind or solar farm. And anyway, Pike County Commissioner Tony Montgomery has publicly backed the project, calling it a "game changer."

Tonight, literally tonight, the developer, Portsmouth Gas DevCo is holding a pre-application open house in Waverly, Ohio. It’s the last thing before the certificate filing.

I think this one sails through – my call is that the certificate gets granted and construction starts Q1 2027.

Who this helps: 

SB Energy and Nvidia. Locking down power equipment and a compressed but functioning federal review means the project's biggest structural risks are already behind it, ahead of a certificate filing that looks like it will sail through.

DOE's other federal-site candidates. DOE named federal sites in 2025 for this same data-center-plus-generation model: Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. A clean run through both NEPA and Ohio's state process lifts them all. 

Who should be nervous: 

Local opposition. Ohio built a tool for communities to block utility-scale energy projects, but it was targeted at wind and solar, not gas. But a massive gas plant and data center could bring everything communities object to about those projects: noise, emissions, truck traffic, an industrial footprint on rural land.

Local utilities and grid operators. After the first tranche of grid-connected megawatts, they’re who have to interconnect several gigawatts of new load, manage the transmission upgrades, and figure out where the power actually comes from.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

7GW // project queue of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which Nvidia took a minority stake in. Cloverleaf develops powered land specifically for data center builders. Terms were undisclosed, but WSJ puts it in the hundreds of millions. Cloverleaf gets access to Nvidia's DSX design platform, while Nvidia continues its spree of investing in power companies, which now includes a strategic investment in Lancium and the $1.5bn backstop for SB Energy above.

$6bn // PJM transmission congestion costs in H1 2026, up 43% from $2.1bn the same time last year. It’s more than the $2bn increase in natural gas fuel costs over the same stretch. The driver is a surge in 500kV transmission line limit violations from 1,865 to 8,920 five-minute periods, mostly during a winter storm, with Northern Virginia among the hardest-hit areas. PJM's independent market monitor also flagged that PJM incorrectly imposes penalty charges, but transmission is still an underpriced risk in the AI power buildout.

2GW // FERC extended two Maryland plants, one coal and one oil, through 2031, two years past the prior 2029 deadline. They are Talen's Brandon Shores coal plant (1,282MW) and H.A. Wagner oil plant (774MW). PJM and Talen cited delayed transmission and data center load growth as the cause. Maryland's last coal plant now runs six years past its original 2025 retirement date, with ratepayers paying $312/MW-day for Brandon Shores and $137/MW-day for Wagner.

13 // New projects added to the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad by NRIC, the DOE's advanced reactor accelerator at Idaho National Laboratory, expanding its advanced reactor and fuel-cycle pipeline, expanding the advanced reactor and fuel-cycle pipeline. The additions span reactor designs and fuel-cycle technologies, continuing the federal push to accelerate the advanced nuclear commercialization timeline.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

ERCOT's data center audit is blocking its own deadline. ERCOT told the PUCT it aims to complete Gov. Abbott's audit of large-load interconnection requests by December, but ERCOT can't finish Batch Zero eligibility verification for the 326 applicants and roughly 205GW of large-load requests until Abbott's information requests are resolved first. Several of those loads are targeting late-2026/early-2027 energization, so a slipping December date puts their timelines at risk.

PJM taking a second run at surplus interconnection service. After a first attempt at surplus interconnection reform produced limited uptake, PJM is exploring a new version that would let generation and storage tap unused headroom at existing interconnection points rather than wait years in the main queue. MISO and SPP are running parallel studies covering roughly 15GW and 14GW of capacity, mostly battery projects.

California's Zone Zero rules finally clear the board. The California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection voted unanimously to require homeowners in the state's highest fire-risk areas to clear flammable material within five feet of structures, covering roughly 2m homes. Although softened from earlier drafts, i sets directions for wildfire liability and insurance in California's grid-serving territories.

Aggreko files an F-1 as data center power demand drives its growth story. The temporary power and temperature control company filed for a US IPO last week and it reveals that revenue from that sector grew more than fourfold, from $96m to $391m, between fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2025, lifting data centers to 11% of net revenue. Aggreko joins a growing list of infrastructure-adjacent businesses whose IPO or valuation depends on AI power demand.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

Read Form Energy raises $750m to ramp low-cost manufacturing. Our LDES analyst's take on the Form Energy opportunity for utilities, hyperscalers, and project financiers, and his latest analysis of Form's manufacturing progress.

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Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 Future Currence // New York, 21 September // Currence’s flagship New York Climate Week event brings the leading utilities, hyperscalers, developers, financiers, and innovators into one room to build a vision for how the AI buildout can create a better grid future. Attendance subject to approval.

📅 Currence Geothermal Breakfast // Houston, 22 September // We're hosting a breakfast September 22nd during Geothermal Rising's 2026 conference to dive into the state of commercialization of advanced geothermal. Register here.

📅 Yotta 2026 // Las Vegas, 28-30 September // Network and learn at the biggest AI infrastructure conference of the year. With 6,000+ leaders across data centers, energy, compute, and capital, the conference is bringing industry leaders together to solve the cross-stack challenge of sustainable, scalable growth in the age of AI. Use code CURRENCE20 for 20% off passes

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and learn how the teams that finance and build the energy system use Currence to stay ahead in the energy and AI buildout, including Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital, and others.