On Monday, August 17, OpenAI signed a 20-year lease agreement for a data center in the small southern Ohio town of Piketon, population 2,300. Piketon is roughly 50 miles south of Columbus, and its data center will likely be the largest in the world.
The 10-gigawatt facility will consume enough electricity to power seven million homes. Given the growth of “no data centers in my backyard” populist backlash, one might expect a deal this size to have spurred mass opposition from local residents. However, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared the Piketon project “the largest bet on a construction facility ever made in history,” Ohioans readily “embraced” or “welcomed” the development.
Why?
The proposed PORTS-Pike Technology Campus, as its developers have christened the site, takes advantage of the least utilized resource in America’s race to build data centers: brownfields. Brownfields, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines them, are properties that often contain hazardous substances, pollutants, or other contaminants that are hard to clean up. Examples include abandoned factories, warehouses, air strips, and other industrial sites. Our best estimates point to between 450,000 and 1 million brownfields in the U.S. As the figure below suggests, it’s highly likely that you live near one, or pass it by on a regular basis.
In July 2025, Trump signed an executive order to streamline permitting for data centers on federal lands — including brownfields. The PORTS-Pike data center is the first of its kind on brownfields held by the Department of Energy (DOE). The success or failure of OpenAI’s data center in Piketon will determine whether AI companies and the federal government can work together to create a better path forward for America’s data center buildout.
Brownfields as mapped with the EPA’s EnviroAtlas interface on August 18, 2026, https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas/enviroatlas-brownfields.
OpenAI’s data center will be built by SoftBank 3,777-acre plot of federal land where the United States once produced its bomb-grade uranium.1The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon was one of three uranium enrichment plants the U.S. operated throughout the Cold War. Since the plant closed in 2001, the DOE has evacuated toxic waste and managed the site. Now, OpenAI and its partners plan to finish the cleanup and thrust the Portsmouth site, once again, onto the high-tech production frontier reshaping the American economy, geopolitics, and everyday life alike.
Portsmouth’s past, and the economic vibrancy and dignified work it buoyed, helps explain why Ohioans support the data center today. “We dream big, but I don’t know that anybody could dream this big,” Steve Shepherd, head of a local organization titling land for the project, told reporters. “I think this is a model for the country.”
To see what he means — and what it would take for him to be right — go back to the first time the country asked Piketon to build the infrastructure of an age.
What America asked of Piketon the first time
In August 1952 the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chose a stretch of flat Scioto River farmland in Pike County as the site of a $1.2 billion plant to enrich uranium — the third and newest node in the complex enrichment infrastructure that built the Cold War arsenal and fueled American power plants. The New York Times announced the decision on page one beneath a headline promising “3 Towns to Be Leveled”; the story beneath it was quieter, recording some 50 farm families to be resettled with the AEC’s help. Residents were assured the plant would pose “no more hazards than an average industry.” Against that assurance, they weighed 17,000 jobs and took the wager.2 It is a bet Piketon is weighing again today.
Top: Construction underway on the Pike County site, April 1953. Eight months earlier this was farmland. Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant Virtual Museum, U.S. Department of Energy. Bottom: The completed plant, Piketon, Ohio — the three process buildings run roughly a mile and a half end to end. Wikimedia Commons, courtesy U.S. Department of Energy.
What rose from the cornfields was a labor-intensive and local “city of knowledge” in America’s nuclear infrastructure. At the Portsmouth plant, engineers put the physics of uranium enrichment to work in three windowless buildings, each a mile and a half end to end, where uranium gas was blasted through fine barriers 4,020 times, separating usable U-235 from dross.3 Electricity powered that process. A new utility, the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation, was chartered for the sole purpose of powering the plant. It filed what was then “the largest financing project ever presented to the Government for its approval,” and built two coal plants for a single customer. The Ohio Valley Electric Corporation provided 1,950 megawatts around the clock — a quarter more power than all of New York City drew, the Wall Street Journal marveled.4
The natural gas complex SoftBank is building at the same site today recreates this midcentury arrangement. Sam Sapirie, who ran operations at another enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, made the hope for nuclear infrastructure clear for all Americans: “We are creating wealth here, treasure worth more than all the gold at Fort Knox … It doesn’t rust or rot or go out of style.”5
A storage yard for depleted UF6 cylinders at the Portsmouth Plant, 1989. Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant Virtual Museum, U.S. Department of Energy.
The wager at Portsmouth paid off quickly. By mid-1954, some 22,500 people were at work on the site. Portsmouth led its entire Federal Reserve district in department store sales. And almost twenty years of population decline were reversed in a single year as Piketon, a village of 700, swelled toward 2,000.6
For a generation, the plant provided the currency that matters most to most Americans, from Pike County to the Big City: job security and predictability. The company newspaper from May 1977 runs the Reds television schedule beside the bowling roll-off results and a classified ad seeking a carpool to Columbus.7 That is what infrastructure work looks like from the inside: mortgages, bowling leagues, a shift you can plan a life around. The bill of health came later: of 16,819 sickness claims filed by Portsmouth workers under the federal nuclear-workers compensation law, 6,530 have been compensated. One process operator, Tim Gannon, was 41 and carrying four cancers when his wife told a reporter in 2001: “The federal government is willing to acknowledge their wrongdoing, and willing to settle, but the Department of Energy, they don’t want to do anything.”8
Portsmouth at the End of History
By the mid-1970s, the split atom appeared inseparable from the future of energy, and Washington planned accordingly. Government scientists gathered at Los Alamos in 1969 had projected that “all studies show that by about 1980 … the demand for civilian power fuel will exceed AEC capacity to produce.”9 To force the case for a new plant, the government closed its order books for enriched uranium in 1974. But the strategy backfired: as the Times later reported, European consortia and the Soviet Union swept in to fill the spurned orders, and utilities began canceling reactors in droves.10 The demand curve for enriched uranium was bending toward the bottom margin.
From the perspective in Piketon, though, what mattered were the jobs Portsmouth had created. When Carter’s administration signaled in April 1977 that the next enrichment plant would go to Tennessee instead, a thousand people packed the American Legion Hall in Portsmouth — “most facets of the community, from industrialists and labor to welfare recipients and the ministry” — and the governor declared “a declaration of war on Tennessee.” Nine days later, 500 gathered in the Municipal Stadium to pray that the President would keep his campaign promise. “We are here to teach the heart of the President,” the organizing minister told the crowd. The Times reporter drew a colder lesson: the rally “may have said more about the disbelief of the people here that they can stop the advance of technology than it said to the President.”11
Ben A. Franklin, “Ohio Rally Prays For Uranium Plant,” New York Times, May 3, 1977, 21.
Ohioans won. That July the government awarded Piketon the full four-unit centrifuge plant — $4.2 to $4.5 billion, 4,000 construction workers, production promised by 1986.12
But the promise of a booming expansion died slowly, and expensively. In 1982 government auditors concluded the plant was not needed at all: existing capacity would cover demand “through the year 2000 and beyond.” By 1983 the Times called the AEC a “uranium pyramid,” useful “only to commemorate the Government’s deficient business sense,” and noted that Washington was paying “more than $100 million a year in penalties for electricity it ordered … but now doesn’t need.”13 In 1985, the Energy Secretary canceled the centrifuge project, writing off $2.6 billion in losses and 2,800 jobs.14 The old plant soldiered on until 2001 under new private owners, who went bankrupt in 2013.15 A brownfield sat under EPA management for two decades. In Piketon, a once bustling community was hollowed out. One 2025 documentary, “This is Pike County,” describes the town’s fate as “what it means to come of age in a place left behind.”
The Portsmouth Plant’s story sounds uncomfortably familiar. A technological arms race makes speed and sacrifice paramount. Government agencies forecast inexhaustible demand. Power plants are etched into the countryside for a single industrial customer. American communities benefited from the hustle and bustle of an infrastructural buildout. They lamented when it went belly up. Most of the debates about the data center buildout coursing through the body politic today — where to site infrastructure, who pays for the power, and what happens if demand falters — were rehearsed in Piketon, within living memory.
From brownfield to silicon prairie
Piketon is not the only brownfield getting a second look in the craze to construct data centers. By my count, at least 65 data center projects have been proposed, built, or defeated on former American industrial and energy sites, including retired coal plants, dead aluminum smelters, shuttered paper mills, reclaimed strip mines, and tombstones of the Cold War weapons complex itself.
At the moment, four are operating, eight are under construction, and 22 were dead on arrival.16
Data centers proposed, under construction, operating, or defeated on former US industrial and energy sites, as of August 19, 2026. Color is status; shape is the site’s former use. Markers sit at town or county centroids. Compiled by the author with Claude Code.
This snapshot into data center development makes clear how important brownfields are becoming in America’s AI infrastructure. Forty-one of the sixty-five sites plotted on the map above fall in a single cluster, running from Paducah to Philadelphia, where old industry left behind precisely what AI companies need: transmission lines, access to water, rail hubs, industrial zoning, and communities of American workers who are used to building in the national interest.
Ohio also protected its residents from the more damning side effects of data center development. Namely, rising electricity prices. In 2025, state regulators approved a tariff requiring big data center customers to pay for at least 85 percent of the power they reserve, whether they use it or not, so companies will bear a large share of the cost if their projects run awry. Once companies signed binding commitments, the data center-driven demand for electricity in Ohio fell from 30,000 megawatts to 5,642.
But lingering brownfields do not guarantee local support. In Janesville, Wisconsin, where General Motors assembled its autos from 1919 to 2009, an $8 billion proposal to remediate the site died in secrecy, a casualty of competing visions for the land. In Paduca, Kentucky — Portsmouth’s sister plant — an activist inverted the argument that AI companies would help remove contamination at sites of heavy industry: “Our biggest concern with all of these projects,” stated the activist Erica Moore, “is that you’re doing it on a Superfund site.”
The tides could turn in Ohio, too. As Axios reported in August 2026, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is warning AI companies that Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) may lose due to his support for data centers. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one,” the Committee said in its memo.
For now, it seems PORTs will be insulated from local politics. Since OpenAI leased federal land in Piketon, neither a village council vote nor a citizen referendum can deploy data center NIMBYism. Indeed, Portsmouth’s mayor only learned of the development on the news.
Making Data Centers Work for Americans
Hating on data centers has gone viral. In the best-case scenarios, Americans are strategically mobilizing to seize the advantage and secure better terms from data center developers. But as often happens on the internet, virality can favor toxicity. In the worst-case scenarios, those #resisting data centers trade in misinformation on issues like water use, deal in regressive NIMBYism, and reinforce a troublesome pattern of political reasoning that leads Americans to see economic growth as bad news — what some call a luxury belief — that only hurts American workers.
I think this debate has unfocused our politics from the important questions, substituting an endless argument over whether America should build data centers at all for much more pragmatic questions about where we could build them, to what extent they might revitalize a local economy or mitigate environmental risks, and who will foot the bill.
Prime brownfield sites like the Portsmouth plant, which have sat rusting despite their many advantages, will offer a coveted win-win-win in American politics: the proposed data center will improve a massive brownfield site, revitalize communities in the region, and contribute to the national economy. Piketon’s own history shows both halves of that promise — the bowling leagues and the write-offs — and the instruments Ohio has built since suggest the country has learned at least some of the lesson.
Not since the Atomic Age have Americans faced such a profoundly world-altering technology. The proliferation of nuclear technologies promised an energy abundance unseen in human history, all while a geopolitical struggle for weapons of mass destruction cast a transformative shadow on culture and everyday living. It is one of those wondrously ironic quirks of history, then, that the aging infrastructure etched into our countryside at the apex of the Atomic Age should be retrofitted into an essential node in the networks of data centers hurling us into an Age of Agentic AI.
Where AI companies and our communities decide to locate those networks matters. Building them in places where Americans once advanced the technological frontier, in the hollers and valleys and fields where laborers, scientists, managers, and capitalists reached tenuous agreements to make industry work for Americans — and in America’s national interest — offers the best chance of securing an AI future that works for all Americans.
SoftBank Energy’s development will be aided by a $105 billion backstop from NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Guarantees SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Ohio to Exclusively Host NVIDIA AI Compute,” NVIDIA Newsroom, August 17, 2026, https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-guarantees-sb-energy-s-ports-pike-technology-campus-in-ohio-to-exclusively-host-nvidia-ai-compute.
C. P. Trussell, “$1,200,000,000 Atom Plant To Be Built in Southern Ohio: Project to Step Up Output of Uranium for Bomb — 3 Towns to Be Leveled,” New York Times, August 13, 1952, 1, 19. ProQuest 112339512.
“History of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant — Uranium Enrichment,” Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant Virtual Museum (Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth for the U.S. Department of Energy), portsvirtualmuseum.org/history/uranium-enrichment.html.
“New Ohio Utility Plans Financing Of $420 Million: Ohio Valley Electric, Owned By 10 Firms, Will Supply Power for Atomic Plant,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 1953, 13. ProQuest 132051361. The 1,950-megawatt commitment is specified in the 1956 OVEC agreement, per the Portsmouth Virtual Museum.
Winston C. Fournier, “Atomic Valley: Nuclear Empire Grows Along the Ohio River; Plants Cost $4 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 1954, 1, 7. ProQuest 132131015. Piketon remains about this size to this day; see U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Decennial Census, Piketon village, Ohio (2,111).
Winston C. Fournier, “Atomic Valley: Nuclear Empire Grows Along the Ohio River; Plants Cost $4 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 1954.
The Wingfoot Clan (Goodyear Atomic Corporation edition), vol. 24, no. 5, Piketon, Ohio, May 1977, 1, 3, 4. Digitized and freely available at portsvirtualmuseum.org/news-archive/newsletters/1977/197705wingfootclan.pdf.
Matthew L. Wald, “U.S. to Make First Payment In Death Tied To an A-Plant,” New York Times, August 9, 2001, A15. ProQuest 92110486.
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and U.S. Department of Defense, Proceedings of the Tactical Nuclear Weapons Symposium, Held at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, September 3–5, 1969, n.d., excised copy, formerly classified Secret, Digital National Security Archive, p. 347.
Editorial, “Halfway Out of a Uranium Imbroglio,” New York Times, June 15, 1985, 22. ProQuest 111126262.
Ben A. Franklin, “Ohio Rally Prays For Uranium Plant: Minister Asks ‘Moral Strength’ for Carter in Making Decision on Location of New Facility,” New York Times, May 3, 1977, 21. ProQuest 123229274. The Legion Hall meeting and the officials’ quotations are from “State & Federal officials urge centrifuge plant in Ohio,” The Wingfoot Clan, vol. 24, no. 5, May 1977, 1.
The Wingfoot Clan, vol. 24, no. 7, July 1977, 1, portsvirtualmuseum.org/news-archive/newsletters/1977/197707wingfootclan.pdf.
“Why Build a Uranium Pyramid?,” editorial, New York Times, August 24, 1983, A22. ProQuest 122143291. The GAO finding is Issues Concerning the DOE Justification for Building the Gas Centrifuge Enrichment Plant, EMD-82-88, May 25, 1982.
“Halfway Out of a Uranium Imbroglio,” New York Times, June 15, 1985, 22.
Matthew L. Wald, “USEC, Enricher of Uranium For U.S., Seeks Bankruptcy,” New York Times, December 17, 2013, B3. ProQuest 1814927856.
Brownfield Data Center Census, compiled August 19, 2026 by the author and Claude, from reporting in the Kentucky Lantern, Data Center Frontier, Data Center Dynamics, the Baltimore Banner, Inside Climate News, Wisconsin Public Radio, the Bangor Daily News and others.