The World’s Largest Data Center Comes to a Struggling Ohio Town

Piketon, Ohio — Tim Neal has seen his southern Ohio town of 2,000 change dramatically over his 73 years.

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Neal watched the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a uranium enrichment facility here, reach its height during the Cold War and then be decommissioned in 2001. Workers there are currently finishing cleanup of the site, and the area, which is already lacking employment opportunities, was set to lose thousands of jobs upon the completion of their task.

But now, Neal is set to see his hometown transform once again thanks to the construction of a massive industrial facility that will help power an economic boom with significant national security implications. SB Energy, a subsidiary of Japanese investment company SoftBank, will build the world’s largest AI data center on the grounds of the former enrichment plant. Neal and his neighbors who were gathered for an afternoon drink at The Grove, a local watering hole, are optimistic about the potential for economic revitalization — but they harbor the same concerns that have made data centers massively unpopular among Americans across the country. 

“They’re real noisy, and if they don’t have a closed water loop, they use a lot of water, and, irregardless, they use a lot of electric,” he told National Review. So long as the center has its own power source and doesn’t expand beyond the government-owned confines of the old plant, it won’t bother him too much. “If they come outside that ground, that’s going to be bad,” he said.

National and state-level polling reveals a deep unease among Americans about data center proliferation; respondents report concern about noise, water and power usage, and pollution. That unease has made data centers and the AI boom they’ll power a significant issue in the upcoming midterms. Roughly 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their area, and politicians on both sides of the aisle have seized on the backlash, producing regulations or moratoria on the building of such facilities. The issue’s salience has only grown in the face of concerns over potential out-of-control AI models.

As the former home of a massive industrial plant — and the future home of the world’s largest data center — Piketon and its residents offer a window into how the issue of data center construction is playing out across the country.

The Department of Energy announced the project earlier this year, and SB Energy projects that it will provide 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 operations jobs. The construction jobs alone make up more than the population of the county in which Piketon resides, and such opportunities are sorely needed in the area. Pike County has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in Ohio, and the latest census data show that 19 percent of its residents live in poverty.

Large manufacturing projects have brought opportunity to Piketon before. When the uranium enrichment plant was starting operations in the 1950s, Pike County’s poverty rate stood at over 40 percent, but it dropped precipitously to about 20 percent by the 1980 census.

Federal officials are bullish about the economic prospects that the data center will bring. The Piketon plan is part of a broader campaign from the DOE called “American Energy Hubs,” in which the department plans to repurpose Cold War–era sites as energy producers or hosts of advanced manufacturing facilities like data centers.

“The U.S. Department of Energy’s American Energy Hubs, like the one in Piketon, are putting federal land back to use to taxpayers,” DOE assistant secretary Tim Walsh told NR in a statement. “The initiative involves selecting private industry [partners] that will maximize economic opportunities in the surrounding communities with projects on federal land that create new jobs and build infrastructure to address the nation’s pressing security, innovation, and energy production needs.”

Representative Dave Taylor, who serves the area in Congress, also spoke highly of the plan, touting the jobs and tax revenue projections. “It’s going to be hugely beneficial, transformative for not just Pike County, but surrounding areas,” he told NR.

Local labor leaders are also thrilled at the data center’s coming employment opportunities.

“I’m actually kind of excited about it because it gives future jobs,” Andria Tipton, president of the United Steelworkers chapter that represents employees at the site, told NR. Workers in Tipton’s union have been cleaning up and demolishing the site for years, and the announcement of the data center project makes it less likely that her members will be unemployed once they finish the cleanup.

“One of the things that we’ve been starting more to talk about is workforce development and training to get them trained to where they could roll over into these new companies that are coming in on site,” said Tipton.

Still, the jobs data centers can bring to an area have not necessarily tempered residents’ concerns nationally. But in Piketon, many of the hazards are set to be mitigated, or the community has dealt with them before.

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The plan is for the natural gas plant to power the data center, and the project’s website promises that it will not affect energy rates. Officials have also promised that the plant will be cooled through a closed-loop water system, which will reduce consumption.

Plus, the area has had experience with a large industrial plant before, thanks to the uranium enrichment facility. Herman Potter, who retired last year after a long tenure in the local USW chapter, which included serving as its president, argued that many of the concerns over the data center also applied to the Cold War site.

“We used a lot of water at the plant,” Potter told NR. “It’s hard for me to believe that we would use as much water for the data centers as we did at the enrichment plant.” The area is also rich in water thanks in large part to the Teays Valley aquifer, which Potter noted could provide lots of water for the new data center.

On the topic of noise, Potter noted that there was “a constant hum all the time from the plant, and it’s my understanding that’s kind of what data centers would have too, so I’m not sure if there’s any significant differences there.”

While the community’s experience with the uranium enrichment plant provides precedent for the data center, it also makes residents a little wary of the new facility. The town’s cancer rates eclipse the national and Ohio averages, and residents can’t help but see a connection between that statistic and a facility that used to enrich uranium. Naturally, that makes them a bit skeptical of another large plant coming into town, though there’s no evidence that data centers produce carcinogenic byproduct.

“There’s a lot of stuff that’s been found in people’s areas that’s cancer-causing,” Neal said. “That’s a whole nother issue.”

As the company plans to begin construction, SB Energy has been attempting to allay such concerns. Asked about the company’s community engagement, a spokesperson directed NR to its website, which details some such efforts.

Sources on the ground also praised the company’s strategy to build good will in the area.

“They have been active in the community,” said Tipton, the union leader. She noted that the company has put up informational posters and done various informational events.

The greatest difficulty Piketon will likely face is that the data center could bring too much development to the area too quickly. The estimated 35,000 construction jobs outnumber the 27,000 people who currently live in Pike County. With people moving in to construct the data center, the population could balloon to a level the community has not seen in a long time. That could raise home prices and put strain on local schools, social services like police and fire, and other infrastructure. The area faced similar challenges in the 1950s during the building of the nuclear plant.

“They had people renting out their chicken coops for people to sleep in,” Taylor said. “So we don’t want to have that problem again.”

Potter, the former union president acknowledged that rapid development from the data center was “a nice problem to have,” but he also said that the community would need help acclimating to the influx of people.

“The state and the federal government is really going to have to step up and help these communities prepare for this,” he said. “They can’t just rely on them to do it on themselves.”

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