OpenAI Portsmouth / 10 GW / DOE federal land / SB Energy / NVIDIA credit / state-moratorium bypass

Plain-English framing. The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (or 'Piketon site') is a Cold War-era uranium-enrichment facility on ~1,200 acres of DOE-owned federal land in southern Ohio. It was decommissioned, and the cleanup created a large, fully-graded brownfield with existing high-voltage infrastructure and federal jurisdiction. In March 2026 the DOE announced a partnership with SoftBank and SB Energy to redevelop the site as the 'PORTS Technology Campus.' The federal-land siting structure. Because the site is federal land leased by DOE, state-level moratoriums, county-level zoning, and Ohio Power Siting Board jurisdiction all have weaker hooks than they would on a normal greenfield. The state Air agency still issues the air permits for the 9.2 GW of gas generation (the Clean Air Act is federal but delegated to state agencies), but the siting, zoning, and grid-interconnection paths all run through federal channels rather than the same state-and-local chain that's tripping up Project Skyway in Pine Island. Why 10 GW at one site is a structurally new category. The largest existing single-site data center campuses are 2-3 GW. Microsoft's Wisconsin campus is ~2 GW; the new Stargate complex is sub-5 GW per site; Applied Digital's largest is sub-1 GW. A 10 GW single-site Vera Rubin AI campus is roughly the demand of 5 million homes; it stresses every gas-pipeline, water-use, and federal-permit assumption built into 2025-era planning. The first GW target for H2 2026 implies an effectively unprecedented permit-and-construction velocity. NVIDIA's credit support means OpenAI's lease is being backstopped by NVIDIA's balance sheet — a chip vendor underwriting the data-center economics of its customer is the structural inversion of how 2010-2020 hyperscaler infrastructure was financed.

Primary source · The Reporting Project (Ohio) / DCD / Network World / Scioto Post ↗