Nvidia Is Backing $105 Billion for an OpenAI Data Center Built on an Old Uranium Plant

Some days the AI news is one big number, and today the number is $105 billion. That is what Nvidia has agreed to guarantee for a single OpenAI data center in rural Ohio, built on the site of an old government uranium plant. Elsewhere, ChatGPT grew a version built specifically for teenagers, and Claude went dark for most of an hour with no public explanation. On the India side, New Delhi opened one of the biggest events in world badminton, and the country quietly crossed a clean energy target years ahead of its own schedule.

Nvidia’s $105 billion bet on a former uranium site

Pike County, Ohio used to be home to the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War era facility that enriched uranium. It is becoming an AI data center campus instead, and the numbers involved are hard to compare to anything else in the industry.

Nvidia has agreed to guarantee as much as $105 billion in lease obligations for the site, now called the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus. OpenAI has signed on as the anchor tenant under a 20-year lease for roughly 8 gigawatts of computing capacity, developed by SoftBank-owned SB Energy in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy.

The scale is meant to be felt locally too. OpenAI expects the buildout to support around 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and about 2,500 permanent operating jobs once it is running, with first capacity coming online in 2028. OpenAI is also putting $40 million into a community grant fund for the area, on top of a matching $40 million already pledged by SB Energy.

It is one more sign of how completely the AI industry’s spending has outgrown ordinary corporate budgets. A single data center lease, backed by a single chipmaker, is now measured in the same range as a national infrastructure program.

ChatGPT gets a version built for teenagers

OpenAI also launched ChatGPT for Teens on Tuesday, a separate experience for users aged 13 to 17 with stricter content rules switched on by default. The update follows a string of lawsuits and public criticism over how the standard version of ChatGPT handled vulnerable young users, including cases involving self-harm.

The teen version restricts conversations around suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and sexual or violent content, and gives parents the option of linked accounts with visibility into their teenager’s usage. OpenAI has also added a Study Mode meant to walk students through problems rather than simply hand over answers, along with homework reminders and scheduled “Study Hours.”

The company is essentially catching up to how teenagers already use the product. ChatGPT has been popular with that age group for years without a version designed for it, and this is OpenAI’s first real attempt to build guardrails around that reality instead of just responding to it after something goes wrong.

Claude went dark, and Anthropic hasn’t said why

Anthropic’s status page logged authentication failures starting at 21:58 UTC on August 16, taking down Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and platform.claude.com while the separate Claude API and developer console kept running. A fix was deployed by 22:22 UTC, and the incident was marked resolved by 22:40 UTC, putting the outage at roughly 42 minutes.

Anthropic has not published a root cause, and as of this writing the company has not said what caused the login failures in the first place. For a company whose products now run inside a huge number of other businesses’ workflows, even a brief authentication outage ripples outward fast, and the silence on the cause is the part still drawing attention.

New Delhi hosts the world’s badminton for the first time in 17 years

The 2026 BWF World Championships opened this week at the Indira Gandhi Arena in New Delhi, running from August 17 to 23. It is the first time India has hosted badminton’s biggest individual tournament since Hyderabad staged it in 2009.

Sixty four players each in the men’s and women’s singles draws, plus 48 pairs across the three doubles disciplines, are competing across the week, with India fielding a strong home squad in a sport where it has built real depth over the past decade. Hosting the event is itself a marker of how far Indian badminton infrastructure and organizing capacity have come since the last time the championships were on Indian soil.

India quietly clears a clean energy target years early

India’s non-fossil fuel power capacity crossed 300 gigawatts as of July 31, 2026, reaching 300.50 GW and pushing past 60 percent of the country’s 500 GW target for 2030, according to the Press Information Bureau. Non-fossil sources now make up more than 54 percent of India’s total installed generation capacity of around 552 GW.

Solar accounts for most of the growth, up to 164.59 GW from just 2.8 GW in 2014. Wind capacity has grown to 58.14 GW from about 21 GW over the same period, alongside 57.24 GW of hydro power, 11.75 GW of bio power, and 8.78 GW of nuclear. The 2025 to 2026 fiscal year alone added a record 55.29 GW of new non-fossil capacity, with solar and wind doing most of the work.

Six years out from a 2030 deadline, India has already cleared more than half of it, which says something about how fast solar in particular has gone from a marginal technology to the backbone of the country’s power additions.

Why these belong in the same story

None of these five stories touch each other directly, and that is sort of the point of a day like this one. The AI industry is now spending sums that used to be reserved for national infrastructure, while also scrambling to protect the teenagers who are its heaviest users, and still can’t always explain why its own products go down. Meanwhile, a different kind of infrastructure buildout, unglamorous and largely uncommented on outside trade press, is quietly clearing targets years ahead of schedule. Both are the story of what gets built when a country or an industry decides something matters enough to spend at this scale. They just don’t often get covered on the same page.