SoftBank's $37B, 10 GW OpenAI Package Sets the Bar Texas Must Match

OpenAI signed a 20-year lease on a 10 GW AI campus in Pike County, Ohio, with SoftBank’s SB Energy owning and operating the build on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant site. Nvidia backstops the first 4.25 GW and covers SB Energy losses up to $105B if OpenAI exits without a replacement tenant; first power is 800 MW in 2028, with construction through 2032 and about $37.2B in generation plus transmission funded so ratepayers carry zero upgrade cost.

The design uses closed-loop, air-cooled recirculation. Tier-one capital is buying packaged generation, private wires, and water-light cooling as one bid, which is the offer Texas developers must match while large-load projects sit in ERCOT’s audit window.

California advanced two large-load bills this week. Senate Bill 886 would have the California Public Utilities Commission make data centers 25 MW and above cover the full cost of new generation, grid upgrades, wildfire mitigation, and related programs they trigger. Senate Bill 887 ties faster permitting to 100% carbon-free hourly use within five years (75% newly built), zero-carbon backup, interconnection prepayment, and community benefits agreements; both were authored by State Sen. Steve Padilla, with PG&E citing 10 GW of data center demand in its decade pipeline.

Elsewhere, Denver, Oklahoma City, and Aurora, Illinois have approved moratoriums; Oklahoma is weighing a statewide three-year pause; Wisconsin’s Manitowoc County adopted an 18-month freeze; South Dakota affirmed local authority to restrict or ban facilities. Cost-allocation rules and local consent are now first-order site inputs, not items to price after land closes.

Amazon’s 8,000-acre GW Ranch in Pecos County pairs a hyperscale campus with Pacifico Energy generation still wired behind the meter. TCEQ’s preliminary determination describes 35 simple-cycle turbines at a nominal 5,000 MW; Pacifico materials cite a broader 7.65 GW stack with storage and solar, first power in Q1 2027, 1 GW by 2028, and more than 5 GW by 2031.

Amazon told Data Center Knowledge it’s “actively exploring” front-of-the-meter service to “add supply to benefit other customers,” with no disclosed ERCOT large-load filing, timeline, or requested capacity. UT researcher Joshua Rhodes notes turbines bound to one private site still consume the same scarce machines every other plant and campus needs.

Bottom line: price self-supply and a future grid filing as parallel paths before Q1 2027 first power, or the turbine slot and the queue position both move without you.

Blue Energy and GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy signed an engineering agreement on a 2.5 GW hybrid plant in Victoria for Crusoe’s nearby campus: roughly 1 GW from two GE Vernova 7HA.02 gas turbines by 2030, then up to 1.5 GW from as many as five BWRX-300 SMRs from 2032, with a final investment decision eyed in 2027.

Blue Energy’s model builds modules off-site at shipyards; the first BWRX-300 is under construction at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site. Crusoe’s original Blue Energy path had pointed at 2028 power; no updated public COD was given with this agreement.

Bottom line: treat 2030 gas and the Ontario SMR proof point as the critical path; a slip is carrying cost in quarters against a live Texas load.

Texas now has at least 335 operating data centers and 225 planned, on a tax stack that began with 2013’s HB 1223 and the 2015 hyperscale expansion under Governor Greg Abbott; the 2028-29 budget cycle puts the sales-tax exemption near $3.3B, up from roughly $14.6M through 2015.

Hill County rescinded a one-year data center moratorium within days of a developer suit, per early reporting that is still thin on case detail. In House District 73, the race is already arguing Hill Country siting against water and cost-shift pressure after Guadalupe County backed a Cloudburst abatement and San Marcos voted a citywide ban; Hood County’s earlier moratorium attempts drew a warning from State Sen. Paul Bettencourt on Senate Bill 6, with an opinion request to Attorney General Ken Paxton still unresolved in the coverage.

Bottom line: show up with transmission cost responsibility and a conditions package counties can defend, or watch the PUCT and ERCOT audit calendar write the defaults without your filing.

Walloon Vice-Prime Minister François Desquesnes refused Google’s modified permit to take 159,000 gallons per hour from the Sambre River for a second Belgian AI hall after one citizen appeal elevated the file. The design would have returned only 25% of abstracted water at about 30°C; he cited the EU precautionary principle and would not accept the cooling-method change under a stressed hydrology.

OpenAI’s Ohio campus is selling the opposite bet: closed-loop, air-cooled systems that claim no continuous refill. Evaporative PUE gains still lose when the water board, not the interconnection study, is the gate.

Bottom line: lock air or closed-loop design and local water offsets before site control, or a single appeal can erase the thermal plan after land is bought.

NVIDIA joined Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR on dedicated pools aimed at $500B for AI factory customers; a single 1 GW factory can run about $60B in build and operating cost, with power at least matching compute.

Vistra signed 2,600 MW with Meta in PJM and up to 1,200 MW with AWS from its Texas nuclear plant; Constellation added 920 MW of long-term nuclear contracts in Q2 plus a 176 MW Walmart deal at Dresden. Sunrun will feed home batteries into Voltus’s Bring Your Own Capacity program in PJM and MISO, following Voltus’s Google path of up to 100 MW accredited distributed capacity per year, but nameplate miles away does not clear the local transformer or the point-of-delivery study.

Bottom line: hold signed baseload or permitted on-site generation before you count VPP credits against an energization date.