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On Tuesday morning, an email arrived at FinTech Weekly from an @softbank.ne.jp address. It was a sovereign declaration — several hundred words asserting universal creditor authority over all land, all commerce, all courts, and all living creatures on Earth, signed by a self-described Chief Justice and Fiduciary of the United States for America, Moroccan Empire Japan Jurisdiction. FinTech Weekly was commanded to rise and stand in perpetuity.
We noted it. Then we moved to the important news regarding SoftBank.
It turns out Masayoshi Son was also declaring himself above the normal rules. His version involved a former uranium enrichment site in Ohio and $500 billion.
The Piketon Campus
On March 20, Son stood alongside US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright at a groundbreaking ceremony on the 3,700-acre former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio — where uranium was enriched for US nuclear weapons from 1954 until 2001 — and announced the largest construction project in US history.
The Piketon AI Data Center Complex, led by SB Energy, SoftBank's infrastructure subsidiary, targets 10 gigawatts of compute capacity at full build-out. For context, that would represent more than half the total operating capacity of every online data center currently running in the United States — in a single campus. Phase one carries a cost of $30 to $40 billion, with construction beginning by end of 2026 and initial capacity of 800 megawatts expected by early 2028. Full deployment targets the end of the decade.
The project is the centrepiece of a $550 billion US-Japan investment commitment negotiated as part of a bilateral tariff relief agreement with the Trump administration. OpenAI is the anchor tenant. Arm, SoftBank's semiconductor design subsidiary, will integrate its processor architecture into the facility's infrastructure. Mizuho and JPMorgan are reported lead lenders.
The Debt Problem
SoftBank's cumulative investment in OpenAI has now reached $64.6 billion, representing approximately 13% ownership, following a $30 billion follow-on commitment confirmed in February. The company is simultaneously seeking a bridge loan of up to $40 billion — its largest ever dollar-denominated borrowing — to finance the position.
The problem is a number: 25%. That is SoftBank's self-imposed loan-to-value ceiling — the maximum ratio of net debt to portfolio value it permits itself under normal conditions.
SoftBank's CFO Yoshimitsu Goto acknowledged publicly that the ratio, which has already climbed from 16.5% to 20.6% in recent months, will likely exceed that threshold temporarily as the AI commitments stack up. S&P revised SoftBank's credit outlook to negative in response, citing rising exposure to unlisted assets and limited headroom.
Son's response, in essence: the rules were written for normal times, and these are not normal times. The AI infrastructure race has no precedent. The entities that control the compute layer will set the terms for everything that follows. Missing the window is the real risk, not the debt.
It is, in its own way, a sovereign declaration.
The Race Nobody Is Waiting For Permission to Run
SoftBank's Piketon campus and Musk's TERAFAB — announced one day later in Austin, Texas — describe the same strategic thesis running simultaneously on different balance sheets.
Both are betting that the entities that control the AI hardware layer will set the terms for every financial, commercial, and technological system built on top of it. Son is building the data center. Musk is building the chip factory that feeds it. Neither is waiting for regulators, credit rating agencies, or self-imposed debt ceilings to catch up.
As FinTech Weekly reported, TERAFAB targets one terawatt of annual compute output from a $25 billion facility in Austin, with 80% of capacity directed toward orbital AI infrastructure. Piketon targets 10 gigawatts of terrestrial compute on a former nuclear weapons site, with $1.5 trillion in projected total investment over twenty years.
For the fintech industry, the infrastructure race is not background noise. Payments, custody, settlement, and every agentic financial system being built today will run on whatever compute layer these projects — and their competitors — deliver. The stakes being placed now are the ones that determine the architecture of the next decade of finance.
Editor's note: We are committed to accuracy. If you spot an error or have additional information about SoftBank's Ohio campus or its AI investment strategy, please email [email protected].
A note on the email referenced in this article: @softbank.ne.jp is a consumer email domain operated by SoftBank Corp., Japan's mobile carrier. It is unrelated to SoftBank Group Corp., the investment conglomerate. The sender has no connection to Masayoshi Son or any SoftBank investment activity.
