SoftBank is the “existing business partner” taking over the former General Motors factory from Foxconn in Lordstown, Ohio, with the site potentially earmarked for a new data center.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the purchase is the result of efforts by SoftBank to involve Foxconn in the $500 billion Stargate data center project, which the Japanese investment company is currently undertaking with OpenAI, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi's MGX.

First reported on August 5, Foxconn sold the 6.2 million sq ft (576,000 sqm) site and its machinery for $375 million to a recently established entity named ‘Crescent Dune LLC.’ At the time, Foxconn declined to comment further on the identity of the buyer, other than to confirm it was an existing partner.

However, while reports from earlier this week claimed that the facility would be converted into a manufacturing plant for cloud computing hardware and servers for AI applications, the sources cited in Bloomberg’s story said the site may instead be used to host a data center.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that SoftBank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI leader Sam Altman have clashed over the terms of the partnership deal, including where to build the data centers.

Despite the two companies pledging in January to immediately invest $100bn in Stargate, the report claimed that the project had instead set a “more modest goal of building a small data center by the end of this year, likely in Ohio.”

Construction of the first Stargate data center is currently underway in Abilene, Texas. The Abilene campus is being developed by Crusoe in partnership with Oracle, on land owned by Lancium, and is expected to eventually have eight buildings and a total of 1.2GW of capacity.

Phase I of the Abilene project, featuring two buildings and more than 200MW, began in June 2024 and was expected to be energized in the first half of 2025, while the second phase, consisting of six more buildings and another gigawatt of capacity, began in March 2025 and is expected to be energized in mid-2026. Oracle has agreed to lease the site for 15 years.