The nuclear site that runs on gas

For half a century the Portsmouth plant in Piketon, Ohio enriched uranium to weapons grade for America's nuclear arsenal. The Department of Energy has spent the last decade decontaminating it. Now DOE is leasing the grounds to SoftBank's energy arm to build a 10-gigawatt AI campus that the agency, in its own announcement, calls the largest in the world.

10 gigawatts of new generation, at least 9.2 of it gas-fired — on a site chosen for its nuclear pedigree.

The new thing is not the scale — it is the landlord. This is the federal government converting its own nuclear-legacy land into AI compute, bundling the lease with SoftBank money to speed up the radioactive cleanup, and framing cheap power as industrial policy. It is a template: contaminated Cold War sites as ready-made, federally-owned compute parks.

The detail the location invites you to expect, and that the deal quietly drops, is nuclear power. A site built to enrich uranium will instead be fed by 10 gigawatts of new generation, at least 9.2 of it gas-fired. The announcement named backers and builders — Hitachi, Bechtel, Goldman Sachs — but no AI company as tenant; the campus is reportedly part of the Stargate program, with OpenAI in talks to anchor it, though DOE confirmed none of that. First power isn't expected until 2029.

What it signals is where the AI buildout is heading: not toward the clean-energy story its sites keep gesturing at, but toward whatever can be switched on fastest, on whatever land the government already owns.