SoftBank, AEP Ohio, and DOE today announced PORTS Technology Campus — a former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio becoming the largest AI infrastructure site in the world. $33B for 9.2 GW of natural gas generation. $4.2B for new 765 kV transmission lines. $30–40B for the data center itself. For scale: Ohio's total generation capacity is about 30 GW. This single project adds a third. And the only reason this is even possible within 4 years is gas. This is a new model: generation + transmission + compute on a single site, built from scratch. And the fuel is gas, because nothing else delivers 9.2 GW of firm capacity in that timeline. Nuclear takes 7–10 years minimum. Solar + storage would require ~30 GW of panels plus massive BESS to firm up 9.2 GW, and neither the land nor the supply chain exists at that scale in 4 years. Wind in southern Ohio has a weak capacity factor. Gas turbines take 2–3 years from order to operation, and SB Energy says the first unit arrives within 12 months with the rest sourced and coming online by end of decade. The PJM context makes this even sharper. Less than 2 GW of new generation is connecting to the grid per year, PJM itself projects reliability shortfalls by 2027, and AEP Ohio reports 30 GW of data center applications in the queue. The grid is full. What's notable is that PJM wasn't notified about the project before the public announcement — spokesperson Daniel Lockwood confirmed this directly. The Ohio Power Siting Board hadn't received any applications either, not for this area and not at this scale. Yet the site was chosen for a reason: the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant is 3,700 acres of federal land with 765, 345, and 138 kV lines and a 345 kV substation connected to both PJM and MISO. SB Energy is starting with a realistic first phase — 800 MW for $10B. Gas generation here isn't one option among many — it's the prerequisite that makes everything else work. Without it, there's no compute, no transmission, no jobs. The scale of AI infrastructure has already outgrown what the existing grid can deliver. Those who build their own generation build data centers. Everyone else waits in the PJM queue. Photo: U.S. Department of Energy, Aerial view of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Piketon, Ohio. #DataCenters #NaturalGas #AIInfrastructure #SoftBank #AEP #PJM #GridReliability #EnergyInfrastructure
