Business leaders and government officials flocked to southern Ohio last Friday to detail plans for a data center so large it needs a $33.3 billion, 9.2-gigawatt (GW) billion natural gas plant to power it.
The groundbreaking event for the artificial intelligence data center had the pomp and circumstance of other tech announcements, where investment and job creation figures are rattled off between glossy videos, over hors d'oeuvres.
When Intel broke ground in Licking County in 2022, it said it could be online by 2025. That aggressive timeline for its semiconductor manufacturing facilities has since been delayed to 2030 and 2031.
“That was a government subsidized CHIPS deal that was a mess from the beginning,” Moreno said.
This, Moreno said in a Statehouse News Bureau interview Thursday, is “very different.”
“It’s fully funded, SoftBank has committed the money.” Moreno said. “I committed to southeast Ohio that I would never forget them. We have to unleash prosperity there, and this is going to do that, and you have just seen the beginning of how this is going to go.”
The facilities, including the behemoth proposed 10-GW data center, will be constructed in stages on revitalized U.S. Department of Energy land in Piketon, where the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant was.
There, the former enrichment buildings are in various stages of demolition. As of March, some are nothing but rubble.
SB Energy, a subsidiary of Tokyo-based SoftBank, will lead the project. It will also invest $4.2 billion in new transmission lines across southern Ohio with American Electric Power (AEP) Ohio. SB Energy was attracted to Piketon because of the high density of the existing transmission infrastructure, among other reasons, according to an official.
To start, the SB Energy official said it will invest $10 billion in an 800-megawatt data center, creating 4,000 construction jobs and 300 to 400 full-time jobs.
