Japanese group SoftBank announced on Saturday plans to build a massive natural gas power plant in the U.S. state of Ohio to provide energy for artificial intelligence data centers. SoftBank aims big with this endeavor. The investment giant is a significant supporter of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Its CEO, Masayoshi Son, has been a longtime ally of U.S. President Donald Trump.
This natural gas plant is part of a broad Japanese investment program of $550 billion in the United States, which Tokyo accepted in exchange for reduced tariffs. The construction of the $33.3 billion power plant, with a “large-scale” production capacity of 9.2 gigawatts (GW), will take place at the Portsmouth site of the U.S. Department of Energy, as announced by SoftBank.
“It’s bigger than any power plant in the world, I think,” Masayoshi Son stated at a ceremony in Ohio unveiling the project last Friday. “At least in the United States, it will certainly be the largest single-site energy production,” he added.
A capacity of 10 GW is planned to power data centers at the site, as confirmed by the U.S. Department of Energy in a statement. SoftBank revealed the creation of a consortium with major American and Japanese companies to assist in building the power plant and developing AI infrastructure in Ohio.
Data centers capable of training and operating conversational robots, image generators, and other AI tools are being constructed on a large scale worldwide. Investments in this rapidly evolving technology show no signs of slowing down.
A study published last month revealed that industrial investment had surged by over a third in 2025 due to investments in AI and data centers in the United States.
