Softbank turns a cold war uranium desert into a 10 gw ai fortress, burning gas to feed the models
The rusting centrifuges that once enriched uranium for America’s nuclear arsenal haven’t spun in decades. Now, in the same fenced-off slice of Ohio, SoftBank is wiring a $33 billion gas-fired engine room that will devour 10 gigawatts—enough to keep every stove, dryer and streetlamp in Ohio blazing—so OpenAI, Anthropic and whoever writes the next transformer paper can keep prompting without a hiccup.
The first 800 mw slice lands in 2028
Rich Hossfeld, co-CEO of SoftBank’s power arm SB Energy, told field engineers the opening salvo—800 MW—will switch on “early 2028.” Turbines are already stamped and queued: unit one ships within twelve months; the rest follow in lock-step until the decade closes. Price tag for that single bite: $30–40 billion, more than the market cap of Ford.
Site choice was no accident. The Department of Energy still owns the Piketon acreage, so SoftBank skips the zoning cage-fight that has stalled data-center projects in Loudoun County and Phoenix. Federal land means federal fast-track; environmental impact statements that normally drag for years are being “parallel-processed,” according to a DOE liaison who asked not to be named because the public comment window hasn’t officially opened.
Trump’s trade chip
The White House has brandished the gas megaproject as Exhibit A in its $550 billion bilateral pact with Japan: SoftBank gets cheap steel tariffs and relaxed auto rules; Washington gets a power-hungry ai beachhead inside its own borders. The calculus is blunt: if the models that decide credit scores, battlefield logistics and drug discovery are trained in Ohio rather than Guizhou, Washington keeps the kill switch.
Yet the same deal inflames local ratepayer groups. Columbus already pays 18 % more for electricity than it did in 2020; adding 10 GW of behind-the-meter demand, even with new gas turbines, will tighten the grid until the next generation of renewables comes online. “We’re being asked to subsidize the compute that replaces our jobs,” said a warehouse union steward outside the Piketon gate, pointing to the half-empty parking lot of a shuttered Kroger distribution center.
Water is the quieter crisis. Each MW of gas-fired cooling still sucks roughly 250 gallons per hour from the Scioto River basin. In drought summers, that cumulative straw bends the flow so low that barges can’t reach Dayton. SoftBank promises closed-loop evaporative towers, but engineers on background admit the fix only trims 30 % of intake; the rest evaporates into Ohio’s already thicker air.
China looms over the smokestacks
Beijing’s state grid just approved 14 GW of ai-centric parks outside Guiyang, all tied to hydro spillover from the Wujiang cascade. They’ll run carbon-free and, more importantly, tariff-free. If Ohio’s gas turbines hiccup on price volatility—Henry Hub has swung 40 % in six months—Silicon Valley CTOs can ship the next training run westward with one API call. SoftBank’s bet is that latency, not carbon, will keep workloads anchored in the Midwest. A 20-millisecond round trip to the East Coast beats 180 ms through the Pacific, and traders pay for microseconds.
The company has hedged: half the Ohio campus is shell space waiting for small modular reactors once the Nuclear Regulatory Commission finishes its rewrite of Part 53. Until then, gas is the bridge, climate math be damned. SoftBank’s own ESG slide deck quietly moved the carbon-reduction target from 2030 to “post-2035,” a footnote that didn’t make the Tokyo shareholder call.
Back in Piketon, the geiger counters still click, but the dosimeters read background now. The new radiation is thermal: 10 GW of exhaust heat rising over the cornfields, a plume visible from the interstate. Drive past at night and the horizon glows orange—flares warming up turbines that will soon decide which startups live, which banks approve your mortgage, which deepfake faces smile back from your feed.
By 2029, when the final row of racks hums at full tilt, Ohio will host the largest non-military compute complex on Earth. The state’s carbon budget won’t balance, its river will run lower, and its voters will decide whether the trade-off—jobs, geopolitics, the illusion of technological sovereignty—was worth the price of admission. SoftBank’s chips are already spinning; the only question left is who pays the electric bill when the promo rates expire.