On a winding road tucked away behind forests in the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio is where OpenAI, Nvidia and Japanese investors are set to spend $500bn on one of the largest artificial intelligence datacenters on the planet. Last March, the energy secretary, Chris Wright, the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick and a host of Japanese and other dignitaries briefly descended on Piketon to enthusiastically break ground on a project to build 8GW worth of AI computing power. But locally, there’s a different feeling: a mix of hope but also concern.
There hasn’t been that much talk. No one’s come to council – I don’t know that there’s been one citizen who lives within the village of Piketon who has come and said: ‘Mayor, what do you think about it?’” SB Energy, a subsidiary of Japanese bank SoftBank Group Corp., will own and operate the project with OpenAI signing a 20-year lease with the company to use the computing capacity delivered by the site. OpenAI would deploy Nvidia AI computing infrastructure at the datacenter, which will open in 2028.
To meet its major energy demands, a natural gas plant would be built nearby, infrastructure expected to be paid for by Japanese money through a $33bn investment. However, the project has fueled concern from environmental groups, with part of it situated on a decommissioned uranium enrichment site that operated for nearly 60 years until 2001. For decades, communities in Pike county have blamed the department of energy-run facility, known locally as the “A-Plant”, for fueling above-average cancer rates and a host of other health issues.
In 2019, a local middle school was forced to close after high levels of radiation were recorded in the building. The project is in large part a consequence of the Trump administration’s tariff and reshoring efforts: The government of Japan in July 2025 agreed to invest $550bn in the US in exchange for lowering tariffs on Japanese products entering the US. America is Japan’s biggest trade partner.
However, a new administration could prevail in Washington after the 2028 presidential election and it could be one that could end Trump’s tariffs and consequently erase any motivation for Japanese investment in the project. That is not lost on Spencer. In July, the state of New York announced a pause in permitting the development of hyperscale datacenters, the first state in the country to do so.
But the allure of huge sums of money is hard to ignore in Pike county, a part of America where the poverty rate, at over 19%, is almost double the national level. The project has promised to generate 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 long-term, operating jobs respectively, with the data center expected to take up around 640 acres, or an area around three-fourths the size of New York City’s Central Park. Environmentalists, however, say there are a host of issues with the plan.
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