SoftBank Group Corp plans to invest up to $3 billion to convert an electric vehicle plant in Lordstown, Ohio, into a manufacturing hub for equipment supporting OpenAI’s upcoming data centers, according to The Information report on Thursday.
The facility will produce equipment for data centers in Texas and other U.S. locations. SoftBank purchased the Lordstown site in August for $375 million, following the sale of its $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia (NVDA.O), as part of CEO Masayoshi Son’s push into AI centered on OpenAI.
The Ohio plant will focus on modular data centers, portable, pre-assembled units designed for faster deployment and scalable capacity, and will feature a small operational data center as a demonstration model. Manufacturing of these units is expected to start early next year.
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On an October livestream, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company aims to build 30 gigawatts of computing capacity at an estimated cost of $1.4 trillion, eventually scaling up to about 1 gigawatt per week, despite current costs exceeding $40 billion per gigawatt. Altman noted that, unlike rivals such as Meta and Google, OpenAI does not have advertising or cloud services revenue to offset data center expansion costs.
SoftBank and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.