Japan's SoftBank Group is promoting an infrastructure project with a data center as its core, located in Ohio, USA. The scale is so large that CEO Masayoshi Son said that the investment in a single park will reach US$500 billion. "We will embark on the largest construction project in the history of the United States," U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Friday when he launched the project with Son and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
SoftBank plans to build the AI computing complex on the site of a former uranium enrichment facility owned by the U.S. Department of Energy, with a power capacity of up to 10 gigawatts. One gigawatt of electricity can roughly supply about 750,000 households at the same time. The company expects the first phase of the data center project to contain approximately 800 megawatts of power, require an investment of $30 billion to $40 billion, and be completed in early 2028.
The project will mainly rely on natural gas power generation, with an investment of approximately US$33 billion in related power generation facilities, and is planned to be completed before the end of this decade.
Although the Trump administration has previously included the $33 billion natural gas project in the broader $550 billion U.S.-Japan trade agreement, this is the first time it has disclosed detailed plans for the accompanying AI data center. Rich Hossfeld, co-CEO of SoftBank-backed SB Energy, said the company has purchased turbines for the natural gas project, with the first equipment expected to be delivered within a year and the rest to be put into operation before the end of this decade. The turbines, which can provide a total of 9.2 gigawatts of generating capacity, will be distributed across the region rather than concentrated in a single campus.
SB Energy also said it plans to provide an additional 800 megawatts of power for data centers, but did not disclose further details.
The surge in demand for artificial intelligence tools is triggering a wave of global data center construction, and AI systems require extremely huge computing power. However, there are also objections in the United States, focusing on the rising costs caused by the large consumption of water and electricity in data centers.
The Trump administration is trying to allay these concerns ahead of this November's midterm elections, such as by requiring technology companies to shoulder related costs and ensuring more power supplies.
The customer for the Ohio data center has not yet been announced, but SB Energy said the customer will be identified soon and will participate in the procurement of chips and equipment. If it reaches 10 gigawatts, the center will become one of the largest, or close to the largest, data centers in the world. Once the corresponding natural gas power generation project is completed, it will also become the largest in the United States, with a power generation capacity equivalent to nine nuclear reactors.
The administration envisions transforming the land, which evolved over decades from farmland to a uranium enrichment plant, into a large complex of data centers and power facilities, according to U.S. Department of Energy officials. The industrial park is as large as a small city and can utilize existing high-voltage transmission lines. The United States currently invests hundreds of millions of dollars every year to clean up land and buildings related to the decommissioned uranium enrichment facility, and about 400 buildings on the site still need to be treated.
SB Energy is working with local power companies owned by American Electric Power Co. (AEP) to invest $4.2 billion to upgrade and build the transmission network to support new loads. Hossfeld said that relevant equipment, including transformers, has been put in place and stressed that the cost will not be borne by ordinary consumers. AEP said in a statement that it expects to begin supplying power to the facility in 2029.
For Ohio, a 10-gigawatt project is a huge challenge. As of 2024, the state's total power generation capacity is approximately 30 GW. For comparison, a 3.75 GW natural gas power generation complex in Florida, USA (currently one of the largest in the country), also took many years to build in phases. When Trump initially touted the scale of the project, industry experts expressed skepticism; it was later revealed that the largest U.S. power grid operator had not been notified of the project, and local regulators were unaware of it.
Cabinet secretaries held a rare joint press conference outside Washington, highlighting the government's efforts to respond to the controversy caused by the expansion of AI infrastructure. This expansion is one of the key components of Trump's agenda. At the same time, this also continues the Trump administration’s policy direction of promoting a new generation of AI data centers to rely on traditional energy sources such as natural gas.
The SoftBank project is one of the latest projects under the $550 billion U.S.-Japan cooperation fund. As part of the deal, the Trump administration lowered barriers such as auto tariffs. The two countries announced the first three projects totaling US$36 billion last month, including a US oil export terminal, a natural gas power plant and a synthetic diamond manufacturing facility.
The project is located at the Portsmouth base in Picton, Ohio (about 70 miles from Columbus), covering an area of approximately 3,700 acres. During the Cold War, weapons-grade uranium was produced here, and later low-enriched uranium was produced for use in nuclear reactors using a now-obsolete gas diffusion technology. Uranium enrichment operations at the facility ceased in 2001.