The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant sits on 3,777 acres in Pike County, southern Ohio. It began enriching uranium in 1954 for the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and at its Cold War peak was one of only three uranium enrichment facilities in the entire country — a direct, physical contributor to the American nuclear arsenal. Enrichment ended in 2001. A multi-billion-dollar radioactive decontamination effort has been underway since roughly 2011 and is still active today; buildings on the site were still being demolished as of March 2026.^[1]

The same land is now becoming the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, one of the largest AI data center projects in the country. Nvidia is providing up to $105 billion in credit support to help finance the build and investing $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary developing it, in exchange for being the site's exclusive AI compute infrastructure provider. OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease that scales from an initial 4.25 gigawatts up to 8 gigawatts. At full build-out the site is planned to generate 10 gigawatts of new power — and SoftBank/SB Energy are separately investing at least $4.2 billion into regional grid infrastructure to support it.^[2]

The nuclear thread doesn't end with the site's Cold War history — it's being renewed on the same ground. Oklo Inc. and Meta Platforms are separately partnering to build a 1.2-gigawatt advanced nuclear fission power campus on the same Portsmouth site, generating power specifically for Meta's own data centers.^[3] A site that stopped producing enriched uranium for weapons in 2001 is, in effect, about to generate nuclear power again on the same land — this time for AI training runs, not warheads.

There is a real human thread underneath the land, not just a new owner for it. Thousands of southern Ohioans worked at the Portsmouth plant between 1954 and its 2001 shutdown, which triggered acute economic distress in Pike County — the county still has the fifth-highest unemployment rate of Ohio's 88 counties. A new PORTS Recruitment and Career Center just opened in Piketon (ribbon cutting May 20, 2026, backed by a $495,000 state workforce-development grant) specifically to route local job seekers into positions at the Technology Campus, alongside a coalition of trade unions, employers, and economic development groups; full build-out is projected to generate roughly 10,000 construction jobs and 2,000 permanent operational ones.^[4] The university piece of this predates the data center deal by well over a decade: Ohio University's Voinovich School has run PORTSfuture, a DOE-funded regional-revitalization and workforce program, since 2010 -- sustained institutional involvement in the site's future, not a school showing up only once the AI money arrived.^[6] A separate DOE-backed effort at the same site, run by Centrus Energy to produce enriched uranium fuel for next-generation reactors, is explicitly retaining 150 existing jobs from the original plant workforce alongside new hires -- a real, if partial, continuity between the Cold War-era crew and what comes next.^[4] That continuity sits next to real, unresolved tension: some Pike County residents balancing the new jobs against decades of health concerns tied to the original site's radiation exposure, a complication this redevelopment doesn't erase just because the money is new.^[5]

Same 3,777 acres, same federal agency that has spent over a decade cleaning it up, same fundamental resource — enormous, concentrated energy production — deployed toward a completely different purpose two generations apart. The Cold War left this land radioactive and expensive to clean. The AI boom is now the reason anyone is investing in it again.