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.
Under the plan, SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, would build 10 gigawatts of new generation, including 9.2 GW of natural gas, to serve a planned 10 GW data center development branded as the PORTS Technology Campus. DOE says the generation would connect to the local grid and that excess capacity is meant to be available to the region.
DOE ties portions of the package to the U.S.-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement, including $33.3 billion in Japanese funding described for the 9.2 GW gas build. SB Energy is also investing $4.2 billion with AEP Ohio for new and upgraded transmission in southern Ohio, which DOE presents as ratepayer-protected under the administration's Ratepayer Protection Pledge.
A March 24 DOE Environmental Management note says SB Energy is leasing federal land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, has committed to help fund accelerated cleanup, and that officials held a groundbreaking on March 20. EM projects about 10,000 construction jobs and more than 2,000 permanent positions. Those employment figures are DOE announcements, not an independent audit of hiring.
Independent coverage from the Associated Press, Ohio's Statehouse News Bureau, and Spectrum News 1 corroborated the SoftBank and AEP Ohio partner split, the 10 GW campus framing, the $4.2 billion transmission figure, and the Japan-linked $33.3 billion gas funding claim. Statehouse reporting further relays company detail that an initial phase could be an 800 MW data center with construction starting in 2026; treat phase sizing and later job-growth figures as partner claims unless DOE restates them.
What remains open is how much of the 10 GW nameplate becomes firm capacity under grid and permitting stress, whether cleanup and lease timelines hold, who the compute tenants will be, and how Portsmouth's gas-heavy bridge compares with other DOE AI-site power mixes. Paducah's later Brookfield and NextEra selection is a separate Kentucky campus in the same federal-lands pipeline, not this Ohio deal.