With an investment of $500 billion, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son advances into Ohio to construct a 10GW "Super AI" data center campus. SoftBank Group has embarked on a data center-centric project in Ohio, touted as the largest construction initiative in the United States; CEO Masayoshi Son has declared that the total investment could reach as high as $500 billion. Accompanied by Masayoshi Son and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stated at the construction site on Friday: "We are going to undertake the largest construction project in the United States." The sheer scale of this project dwarfs even that of tech giants. The data center campus boasts a capacity of 10 GW—making it one of the largest in the world, if not the absolute largest. SoftBank plans to construct this AI computing campus on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant owned by the U.S. Department of Energy, and intends to invest approximately $33 billion in natural gas-fired power generation to support the facility. SoftBank anticipates that the first phase of the data center project will encompass a power capacity of approximately 800 megawatts (MW), cost between $30 billion and $40 billion, and be completed by early 2028. Just 14 months ago, Masayoshi Son—alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle founder Larry Ellison—pledged to invest $500 billion to build data centers and AI infrastructure; this initiative forms part of the so-called "Stargate" investment project. Subsequently, OpenAI expanded the scope of this effort to incorporate data center agreements reached outside the framework of the original joint venture. The Ohio project serves as a clear demonstration of SoftBank's ambition to significantly ramp up its investments in this sector. Masayoshi Son stated: "Rather than being scattered across various locations and taking years to complete, we are achieving a scale of $500 billion within a single campus." (SoftBank is currently also involved in construction projects at multiple sites across the U.S. operating under the "Stargate" banner.) Regarding the natural gas component of the Ohio project, Rich Hossfeld—Co-CEO of SoftBank-backed SB Energy—announced that the turbines have been procured. The first batch is scheduled for delivery within a year, while the remainder will be brought online in phases by the end of 2029. These turbines, with a combined generating capacity of 9.2 GW, will be deployed across multiple local sites. SB Energy plans to provide an additional 80 MW of capacity specifically for the data centers. Given that Ohio's total power generation capacity stood at just 30 GW as of 2024, this 10 GW project is undoubtedly a monumental undertaking. For instance, a 3.75 GW natural gas power plant in Florida—considered one of the largest in the U.S.—took years to construct and was brought online in stages.
