To the Editor:
I grew up in southern Ohio. I want to see the PORTS Technology Campus succeed. A project of this scale landing in Pike County could be the kind of investment the region has needed for decades, and I understand why people are excited about it. But I have spent twenty-seven years building and managing technology infrastructure for global financial services companies, and I think the benefits of this project are being significantly oversold. The community deserves a more honest conversation about what comes after the construction phase.
Your paper has done the best reporting on this project of any outlet in the state. I want to add something that has been missing from the public discussion: what data centers actually look like once the construction crews go home.
Data centers are engineered to run without people. The whole point of a hyperscale facility is that you do not need many humans in the building. A modern site running 50 megawatts operates with 30 to 50 on-site staff. And the ratio does not scale the way people assume. Doubling the facility does not double the workforce. The hundredth server rack does not require a hundredth technician. It requires the same technician walking a longer hallway.
I am not going to put a specific number on permanent jobs because SoftBank has not, and that silence should tell you something. What I can tell you is this: ask them. Ask for the number. Ask how many permanent, full-time positions the data center campus will support at steady state. Ask what those roles are. Ask where those workers will be recruited from. Because at every major data center in this country, the network operations, capacity planning, incident response, and infrastructure engineering teams sit in established tech hubs in Dallas, Northern Virginia, the Bay Area, and Bangalore. They manage facilities like this one from a screen. They will not be living in Pike County.
The on-site roles that do exist at a campus like this are primarily hardware swap technicians, cooling system operators, physical security, and a small maintenance crew. Real jobs, but shift work, and many will be filled by workers with vendor-specific certifications recruited from outside the region.
The construction phase is a different story. Several years of real work for trades, heavy equipment operators, local suppliers. I am not dismissing that. It will be a meaningful stimulus while it lasts. But a construction boom is not an economic transformation, and Pike County knows the difference better than most. This community enriched uranium for fifty years and was left with contaminated groundwater and cancer rates that your paper has documented better than anyone.
There is also something nobody at the groundbreaking talked about: the transmission infrastructure. AEP Ohio is planning $4.2 billion in upgrades to deliver power to this campus, including 765-kilovolt high-voltage lines. If you have not seen what a 765kV transmission corridor looks like, I would encourage you to look it up. The towers stand over 100 feet tall. The rights-of-way require clear-cutting swaths 150 to 200 feet wide through whatever is in the path. Multiple corridors converging on Piketon from distributed gas turbine sites across the region would permanently change the landscape of southern Ohio. And that power is not going to the grid. It is going to the data center. The community absorbs the visual and environmental cost, and gets none of the electricity.
I want this project to work. But there are structural questions about whether it survives long enough to reach the operational phase at all. According to reporting from your paper and others, SoftBank holds no equity in the gas plant. It collects developer fees. Reports indicate those fees have already been substantially reduced. The $33 billion in financing flows from a U.S.-Japan trade agreement that the same administration is pressuring through tariff investigations. And the anchor tenant for the data center campus, OpenAI, is not yet profitable and has committed to over a trillion dollars in infrastructure deals while still relying on outside capital to operate.
If any one of those pillars weakens, this project does not scale back gracefully. It stalls. And Pike County is left with partially built infrastructure on land that still has not been fully remediated from the last time the federal government had big plans for it.
The people of this community have earned the right to hear real numbers before they buy in. I would encourage anyone reading this to demand them.
Kevin I.
Technology industry professional
Grew up in southern Ohio; now based in Texas
Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in this letter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Scioto Valley Guardian (SVG).