(Bloomberg) — SoftBank Group Corp. is developing a data center-focused project in Ohio so massive that Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son said it would channel $500 billion into a single campus.
“We are going to do the largest construction project in the country,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Friday alongside Son and Energy Secretary Chris Wright at the site.
While the US is witnessing a historic scramble by tech companies to build out artificial intelligence computing, the project’s scale described by Son and Trump officials has little precedent. At 10 gigawatts, the center would be among the largest — if not the largest — in the world. For context, a single gigawatt of capacity can power roughly 750,000 homes at any given moment.
SoftBank is planning to construct the AI computing complex at a former uranium enrichment complex owned by the US Energy Department. It would be powered with roughly $33 billion worth of natural gas-fired electricity.
The company expects the first phase of the data center project to include about 800 megawatts of power, cost $30 billion to $40 billion and be completed in early 2028.
Son unveiled the project about 14 months after he, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison pledged to build $500 billion in data centers and AI infrastructure as part of the so-called Stargate venture. Since then, OpenAI has expanded Stargate to include agreements for data-center deals made outside of the original LLC.
The Ohio project shows how SoftBank’s ambitions have further risen. “Instead of many locations, many years,” Son said, “now we are delivering $500 billion in one campus.” (SoftBank remains involved with multiple Stargate-branded sites in the US.)
Soaring demand for AI tools has touched off a worldwide expansion of data centers, with systems requiring enormous amounts of computing capacity. A backlash over the buildout is growing across the US centered on the increasing costs of water and electricity, both of which data centers require in large volumes.
The Trump administration has been trying to address those concerns ahead of this November’s midterm elections by, among other things, exacting pledges from technology companies that they’ll pick up the costs and securing more power commitments. Failure to add more power supplies would also threaten to thwart a key priority for President Donald Trump — winning the AI race against China.
For the gas part of the Ohio project, turbines have been sourced, the first of which is expected to be delivered within a year and the rest will come online by the end of the decade, said Rich Hossfeld, co-chief executive officer of SoftBank-backed SB Energy. The turbines, capable of generating 9.2 gigawatts in total, will be installed across the region.
SB Energy said it plans an additional 800 megawatts of capacity for the data center, but provided no further details.
When Trump first touted the Ohio project’s size, industry experts were immediately skeptical. It was later revealed that the biggest US grid operator, whose territory includes the Ohio area, hadn’t been notified of such a project. Ohio regulators also hadn’t been flagged.
A 10-gigawatt project would be a big undertaking given Ohio only had about 30 gigawatts of total generation as of 2024. As an example, a 3.75-gigawatt natural gas-fired power complex in Florida — currently among the largest in the US — took years to construct and bring online in phases.
Customers for the Ohio data center have yet to be announced, but SB Energy said they’re coming and that they’ll be involved in sourcing the chips and equipment housed within the facility.
The Trump administration envisions reusing land that’s evolved over many decades from farm to a uranium enrichment plant to now potentially a data center coupled with electric facilities, according to an Energy Department official.
It’s an industrial complex so massive that it resembles a small city, sprawled across a 3,700-acre plot in Piketon, Ohio, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) south of Columbus — and has existing high-voltage power lines that the new infrastructure can tap.
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