SoftBank Group Corp. has laid out plans to build a substantial AI computing complex on federally owned land in Ohio, with the power backbone supplied by roughly $33 billion of natural gas-fired electricity scheduled to be installed by the end of the decade.
The company intends to locate the project at a former uranium enrichment complex under the ownership of the US Department of Energy. The proposed data center campus is engineered to draw approximately 10 gigawatts of power - a scale that the company has highlighted in public descriptions of the plan. For context supplied by the project brief, a single gigawatt of capacity can service about 750,000 homes at any one time.
SoftBank anticipates that the broader data center initiative - inclusive of the computing chips and associated equipment - will require capital in the range of $30 billion to $40 billion.
While US administration officials have previously referenced SoftBank’s $33 billion gas generation component as part of a wider $550 billion US-Japan trade initiative, this announcement provides the first explicit detail of the AI data center scheme and its intended technical footprint.
Rich Hossfeld, co-chief executive officer of SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed energy arm, said the company has sourced turbines for the gas project. According to the timeline provided, the initial turbine units are expected to be delivered within a year, and the remainder are slated to come online by the end of the decade.
The set of turbines procured is capable of producing a combined 9.2 gigawatts of generation capacity. Importantly, SB Energy said those turbines will be installed across the surrounding region rather than concentrated at a single central complex.
In addition to the turbines and regional generation build-out, SB Energy is planning an incremental 800 megawatts of new capacity specifically for the data center installation.
Taken together, the plans describe a multi-billion dollar effort that pairs large-scale gas-fired generation with a significant deployment of computing hardware. The information released so far outlines the broad financial and technical parameters - site, power draw, estimated equipment costs, turbine capacity, and staged delivery - while details beyond those elements have not been specified in the material provided.