SoftBank’s $500 Billion US Bet – Japan’s Biggest Deals Happen in English

(Japan Times Mar. 21, 2026)

SoftBank planning massive $500 billion data center in Ohio (full article below)

Masayoshi Son just committed SoftBank to the largest construction project in US history: a 10-gigawatt AI data center campus in Ohio, backed by $33 billion in natural gas infrastructure. It’s part of a broader $550 billion US-Japan investment deal negotiated directly with the Trump administration.

When Japanese companies deploy capital in foreign markets, every negotiation, partnership, and board presentation happens in English. The executives who close these deals don’t just understand the numbers – they command the room.

With ThinkLish – you will too.

(Ohio – not gozaimasu) SoftBank Group is working to deliver a data center-focused infrastructure project in Ohio so massive that CEO Masayoshi Son said it would channel $500 billion into a single campus.

“We are going to do the largest construction project in the country,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Friday, unveiling the project alongside Son and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

SoftBank is seeking to build the AI computing complex, capable of drawing 10 gigawatts of power, at a former uranium enrichment complex owned by the U.S. Energy Department. For context, a single gigawatt of capacity can power roughly 750,000 homes at any given moment. The company expects the first phase of the data center project to include about 800 megawatts of power, cost $30 billion to $40 billion and be completed in early 2028.

The project would be powered with roughly $33 billion worth of natural gas-fired electricity to be installed by the end of the decade.

While U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has cited SoftBank’s $33 billion gas project as part of a broader $550 billion U.S.-Japan trade deal, this is the first detailed look at the associated AI data center plans. The company has sourced turbines for the gas project, the first of which is expected to be delivered within a year and and the rest will come online by the end of the decade, said Rich Hossfeld, co-CEO of SoftBank-backed SB Energy. The turbines, capable of generating 9.2 gigawatts in total, will be installed across the region as opposed to at a single complex.

SB Energy said it plans an additional 800 megawatts of capacity for the data center, but provided no further details.

The soaring demand for artificial-intelligence tools has touched off a worldwide expansion of data centers, with AI systems requiring enormous amounts of computing capacity. A backlash over the buildout is growing across the U.S. centered on the increasing costs of water and electricity, both of which data centers require in large volumes.

The Trump administration has been trying to address those concerns ahead of this November’s midterm elections by, among other things, exacting pledges from technology companies that they’ll pick up the costs and securing more power commitments. Failure to add more power supplies would also threaten to thwart a key priority for Trump — winning the AI race against China.

Customers for the Ohio data center have yet to be announced, but SB Energy said they’re coming and that they’ll be involved in sourcing the chips and equipment housed within the facility. At 10 gigawatts, the center would be among the largest — if not the largest — in the world. The natural gas project would similarly become the biggest in the U.S. if built, supplying the equivalent of nine nuclear reactors.

The Trump administration envisions reusing land that’s evolved over many decades from farm to a uranium enrichment plant to now potentially a massive data center coupled with electric facilities, according to an Energy Department official. It’s an industrial complex so massive that it resembles a small city — and benefits from existing high-voltage power lines that the new infrastructure can tap. The U.S. already provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year to clean land and buildings linked to the retired uranium enrichment plant. About 400 buildings at the site still need to be cleaned.

SB Energy is working with American Electric Power Co.’s local utility to invest $4.2 billion in upgrading and building the transmission necessary to support the new load. Hossfeld said equipment for that, including transformers, has already been lined up, stressing that consumers won’t foot the bill. AEP said in a statement that it expects power to begin flowing to the facility in 2029.

A 10-gigawatt project would be a tremendous undertaking given Ohio only had about 30 gigawatts of total generation as of 2024. As an example, a 3.75-gigawatt natural gas-fired power complex in Florida — currently among the largest in the U.S. — took years to construct and bring online in phases. When Trump first touted the project’s size, industry experts were immediately skeptical. It was later revealed that the biggest U.S. grid operator, whose territory includes the Ohio area, hadn’t been notified of such a project, and Ohio regulators hadn’t been flagged.

The unusual gathering of multiple cabinet secretaries outside of Washington for a press conference underscores the administration’s efforts to show it’s trying to address the backlash to an AI infrastructure buildout that has served as key part of Trump’s agenda. It also builds on the administration’s push for this new generation of AI data centers to rely on conventional electric resources such as natural gas.

The SoftBank project is the latest from the $550 billion fund that the U.S. and Japan agreed to as part of a pact that saw Trump lower auto tariffs and other levies. The two countries announced a trio of debut projects totaling $36 billion last month, including a U.S. oil export terminal, gas power plant and synthetic diamond manufacturing facility.

The Portsmouth site, a sprawling 3,700-acre plot in Piketon, Ohio, about 113 kilometers south of Columbus, once produced weapons-grade uranium during the Cold War and later supplied lower-grade uranium that fueled nuclear reactors using a now obsolete technology known as gaseous diffusion. Enrichment operations at the site ceased in 2001.