The U.S. Department of Energy, alongside the Department of Commerce, said on March 20, 2026, that SoftBank and AEP Ohio will redevelop DOE land at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio, for advanced computing and new power infrastructure. The plan pairs a planned 10 GW data center campus with a power build that leans heavily on natural gas, on the grounds of a former uranium enrichment plant, as part of DOE's effort to put AI projects on its own land.
Under the plan, SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, would build 10 gigawatts of new power generation, including 9.2 GW of natural gas, to serve a planned 10 GW data center development called the PORTS Technology Campus. DOE says the power plants would connect to the local grid and that spare capacity is meant to be available to the region.
DOE ties parts of the package to the U.S.-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement, including $33.3 billion in Japanese funding for the 9.2 GW gas build. SB Energy is also investing $4.2 billion with AEP Ohio in new and upgraded power lines in southern Ohio, which DOE presents as protecting ratepayers, the people who pay electricity bills, under the administration's Ratepayer Protection Pledge.
A March 24 note from DOE's Office of Environmental Management says SB Energy is leasing federal land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and has committed to help fund a faster cleanup of the site. Officials broke ground on March 20. The office projects about 10,000 construction jobs and more than 2,000 permanent positions. Those job numbers are DOE's projections.
According to a news report, SB Energy said a first phase could be an 800-megawatt data center, with construction starting in 2026. Those phase details come from SB Energy rather than DOE.
It is not yet clear how much of the planned 10 GW will be reliably available once grid and permitting limits come into play, whether the cleanup and lease schedules will hold, or which companies will rent the computing power. Nor is it clear how Portsmouth's heavy reliance on gas compares with the power plans at other DOE sites offered for AI. DOE's later choice of Brookfield and NextEra for a campus at its Paducah site in Kentucky is a separate project in that same effort, not part of this Ohio deal.