Piketon Reborn as a Ten Gigawatt AI Powerhouse

A $33 billion partnership transforms a legacy uranium plant into a high-tech data hub, boosting Ohio’s economy without raising local power bills

21 Apr 2026

In the rolling hills of Southern Ohio, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant once spent decades enriching uranium for the American nuclear arsenal. Today, the site is being prepped for a different kind of power. A $33bn partnership between SoftBank and the Department of Energy aims to turn this federal wasteland into a 10GW data center hub. It is a classic exercise in industrial recycling: converting a legacy of the atomic age into the backbone of the artificial intelligence boom.

The project addresses a growing anxiety in the American heartland. As tech giants descend on rural areas, residents often fear that the massive energy requirements of AI will lead to flickering lights and soaring utility bills. To bypass this, the developers are not merely plugging into the wall. SB Energy plans to build 9.2GW of dedicated natural gas generation. In theory, this creates a private energy island that services the silicon chips without starving the neighbors.

The fiscal architecture is equally ambitious. Alongside the data centers, a $4.2bn investment in transmission lines and substations, managed with AEP Ohio, intends to bolster the regional grid. The developers have promised a "ratepayer protection framework," ensuring that the private firms, rather than Ohioan households, foot the bill for the new pylons. If the math holds, the local community gains a more resilient power system at no extra cost.

For Piketon, the stakes are more than just electrical. The region has spent decades searching for a post-Cold War identity. The project is expected to create 10,000 construction jobs and 2,000 permanent roles, a significant injection of life for a town that once specialized in the ingredients of Armageddon.

Yet, as with all large-scale industrial shifts, the trade-offs are real. Replacing nuclear ghosts with gas-fired turbines and humming servers shifts the environmental burden rather than erasing it. For now, however, the federal government seems content to trade old contamination for new computing. By leveraging public land for private processing power, Washington is betting that the path to technological supremacy runs directly through the repurposed ruins of its military past.