Softbank to plug a 10 gw ai monster into ohio’s old uranium fields
SoftBank just booked America’s largest ghost town of冷战 concrete—the Department of Energy’s shuttered uranium plant outside Piketon, Ohio—to host a 10-gigawatt AI data-city that will guzzle more electricity than Greece. First course on the menu: 800 MW of gas-fired turbines, $30–40 billion, switch-on by early 2028. Total tab before 2030: $33 billion, all fossil, all domestic, all approved without a public RFP.
The gas is already on the truck
Rich Hossfeld, co-CEO of SoftBank’s SB Energy, says turbine serial numbers are assigned and the first 200-ton frame ships in twelve months. The rest follow in a conveyor-belt cadence until the site hits the advertised ten gigawatts—enough to train whatever supersized model Silicon Valley dreams up next. No offshore wind rider, no SMR add-on, no green-hydrogen fig leaf. Just Ohio shale, burned in Ohio air, 24/7.
Washington signed off weeks ago. The Trump administration quietly folded the project into its side-letter with Tokyo that slashed auto tariffs in exchange for a $550 billion U.S.-Japan investment pledge. Three pilot deals—an oil export terminal, a gas plant, a synthetic-diamond foundry—were announced last month. SoftBank’s uranium-to-AI conversion is the fourth, and by far the loudest.
Why piketon, why now
The site already owns federal security clearance, river-cooled infrastructure and a 345-kV transmission spine built during the centrifuge era. That shaves half a decade off typical hyperscale lead times. More important: it gives SoftBank a power island immune to the grid congestion that’s throttling Virginia and Arizona. Ten GW delivered privately means no queuing studies, no shared upgrade costs, no county-level NIMBY revolt—just a fence, a gas line and a presidential memorandum.
Locals were briefed last week. The promise: 3,000 construction jobs, 600 permanent ops gigs, and a new municipal tax floor that could double the school budget overnight. The omission: no binding clause on water draw. Each gigawatt of evaporative cooling can drain 8 million gallons a day from the Ohio River during summer peaks—roughly what the entire city of Portsmouth uses in 24 hours.
China, chips and campaign math
Inside the White House the Pike County megacomplex is framed as a Manhattan Project for model weights: if Washington doesn’t deliver cheap, abundant compute on American soil, Beijing will. The 2026 midterms hover in the background; swing-state Ohio gets a tech cathedral, Japan keeps its auto discounts, and Trump keeps a campaign talking point that doesn’t mention abortion or inflation. SoftBank keeps the equity, the DOE keeps the liability for any legacy radioactive quirks, and the climate keeps the CO₂—up to 50 million tons a year once the plant is fully fired.
The gambit is vintage Son: bet bigger, move faster, negotiate directly with sovereigns. First he bought Sprint, then Arm, now a slice of the U.S. power stack. If the grid decarbonizes later, he can flip the turbines for reactors or batteries; the real estate alone appreciates with every new model roll-out. Meantime, the gas turbines are non-cancelable, paid in yen, hedged against American rate hikes.
Data-center watchers call the number hallucinatory. Ten gigawatts equals the entire digital footprint of Northern Virginia plus Silicon Valley. One company, one fence, one fuel source. The concentration risk is medieval: a lightning strike, pipeline rupture or cyber breach could wipe out compute capacity comparable to a small cloud region. SoftBank says it will subdivide into “autonomous resilience zones,” but drawings haven’t been filed yet.
Ohio’s governor signed a nondisclosure that bars release of energy-consumption data until 2032. Environmental groups are scrambling for FOIA leverage; they may find none, because the site is still federal land, legally outside state air-permit rules. The EPA can intervene only if national ambient standards are breached—which won’t be measured until turbines are spinning.
Wall Street analysts already pencil SoftBank’s enterprise value $30 billion higher on the news, never mind that the first watt won’t arrive before the next presidential cycle. Arm Holdings’ stock jumped 11 % on the thesis that custom AI silicon will be fabbed somewhere inside the complex—an angle SoftBank hasn’t confirmed, but hasn’t denied either.
Bottom line: a Japanese conglomerate is turning America’s Cold War uranium dust into a private compute empire, fed by fracked gas, protected by federal secrecy, and green-lit under a trade deal that has nothing to do with climate. By the time the turbines reach full song, the AI models they train may be writing the regulations intended to shut them down—if anyone still controls the off switch.