SoftBank plans $33B 9.2GW gas plant on Ohio-Kentucky border

SoftBank is preparing to do what America’s “market design” and green-industrial policy have been quietly training large players to do for years: bypass the public grid bottleneck by building private baseload.

TechCrunch, citing a Bloomberg report, says SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy is expected to spend about $33 billion on a 9.2-gigawatt natural-gas power plant on the Ohio–Kentucky border. If built, it would be the largest power plant in the United States, a scale that would normally trigger years of siting fights, turbine procurement delays, and the sort of “stakeholder process” that turns engineering into paperwork. Bloomberg notes gas plant costs have surged; $33 billion is far above recent benchmarks, and the obvious question is who ultimately carries the risk.

SoftBank’s timing is not subtle. The firm is partnered with OpenAI on the “Stargate” data-center push, and OpenAI and SoftBank are reportedly developing a proof-of-concept facility at General Motors’ former Lordstown assembly plant. Whether SB Energy’s project will feed the general grid or directly supply data centers remains unclear, but the economics of a 9.2GW build increasingly point to dedicated offtake: long-term power purchase agreements, bespoke transmission upgrades, and reliability guarantees that hyperscalers can’t get from a queue-based interconnection regime.

This is the part politicians keep skipping in their speeches about electrification: the US grid is not short of slogans; it is short of firm capacity delivered on time. Interconnection queues, permitting delays, and regional planning disputes make “100% clean” targets look like a procurement problem until you try to procure. Then it becomes a governance problem.

A plant of this size would also be a climate lightning rod. TechCrunch estimates roughly 15 million metric tons of CO₂ per year from combustion alone, with methane leakage upstream potentially worsening the footprint. Yet the market signal is that reliability beats virtue statements—especially when AI workloads are measured in megawatts per campus and downtime is priced in reputational catastrophe.

None of this requires conspiracy. It’s the predictable outcome of a system where regulators ration grid access, subsidize intermittent generation, then act surprised when the most capitalized actors build parallel infrastructure. If the project proceeds, watch the unglamorous details: interconnection rights, transmission cost allocation, capacity market treatment, and whether state regulators attempt to socialize costs to ratepayers while privatizing the upside to a single customer class.

The “energy transition” may still be happening. It’s just being underwritten by gas turbines and structured like a data-center tenancy agreement.