10 Gigawatts and $500 Billion: Inside the OpenAI ‘Stargate’ Data Center Being Built in Ohio
Ohio, United States, March 22, 2026 — In a staggering shift in strategy, SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son has announced that the company will funnel its monumental $500 billion AI infrastructure investment into a single, colossal data center campus in Ohio, rather than spreading it across multiple locations nationwide.
The announcement, made alongside top Trump administration officials including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, officially crowns the initiative as the largest single construction project in United States history.
The ‘Stargate’ Vision Consolidated
The massive investment is the physical manifestation of “Project Stargate,” a joint venture formed by SoftBank, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison to secure American dominance in the global artificial intelligence race against China.
“Instead of many locations and many years, now we are delivering $500 billion in one campus,” Son declared during the project update.
Here is a look at the sheer scale of the Ohio megaproject:
The Location: The campus will be sprawled across a 3,700-acre plot in Piketon, Ohio. The site is highly strategic; it was formerly a Cold War-era uranium enrichment complex owned by the US Department of Energy, meaning it already possesses the high-voltage power lines necessary for the new infrastructure to tap into.
Powering the AI: The facility will require a mind-boggling 10 gigawatts (GW) of total power. For context, 1 GW is enough to power roughly 750,000 homes, meaning this single campus will consume enough electricity to theoretically power 7.5 million households.
Gas-Fired Energy: To meet this unprecedented demand without entirely crippling the local grid, the site will be powered by approximately $33 billion worth of dedicated natural gas-fired electricity turbines.
Timeline and Cost: The first phase of the campus is expected to be fully operational by early 2028. This initial stage alone will cost between $30 billion and $40 billion and draw 800 megawatts of power.
Pushback and Challenges
Despite the economic influx, a project of this magnitude is already facing severe headwinds. When the 10-GW project was first touted, PJM Interconnection (the biggest US grid operator) and local Ohio regulators revealed they had not been officially notified.
Furthermore, local residents and environmental advocates have expressed deep concerns that a data center of this size will drastically drive up regional water and electricity prices. In response, the Trump administration has begun pushing tech giants to privately fund their own power generation and grid upgrades so that the costs are not passed down to everyday residential consumers.
As part of the initiative, SB Energy (a SoftBank unit) has already committed to investing $4.2 billion to upgrade the transmission lines in southern Ohio.