SoftBank Acquires Foxconn’s Former GM Factory in Lordstown, Signals Preparation for the AI Revolution

SoftBank quietly bought the old Foxconn General Motors factory in Lordstown, Ohio. Once intended for the production of electric vehicles, the closed factory should now serve as an assembly center for AI servers – an essential element of the vast “Stargate” project, a plan of more than one Billion of dollars earlier this year by SoftBank with Openai and Oracle.

Over the past decade, Softbank has increased from a high risk investor to a key AI global infrastructure architect. The unstable era of Silicon Valley startups like WeWork and Uber left the company in shock, which caused a new approach built around AI -centered investments and infrastructure ownership. Today, his vision fund has issues in giants like Nvidia and Openai and has pivoted tangible assets such as data centers and tamine manufacturing pipelines.

The acquisition of Lordstown installations seems to crystallize this change: it provides a physical base in the United States for the manufacture of servers or the development of colocated data centers, allowing SoftBank to accelerate the early deployment of Stargate where it needs the fastest infrastructure.

Stargate’s vision is deep – and long

Announced at the White House at the start of this year by Donald Trump, the Stargate initiative is the most daring bet of SoftBank – a plan of $ 500 billion to build AI infrastructure across the United States, including ten data centers from Texas and potentially for enlargement worldwide.

SoftBank plays the role of financial anchor in the company while Openai has operational leadership. Oracle and MGX, among others, join as co-investors, while Optai has engaged $ 30 billion a year in IT contracts with Oracle, one of the largest cloud offers ever signed in IA infrastructure. This agreement alone feeds the center in Abilene, Texas, possibly moving to several gigawatts of GPU’s outfit and hosting millions of AI chips.

The Lordstown site may well become the first domino to fall towards the delivery of the tangible assets of this high condemnation speculative project.

Softbank’s renewed financial health makes this part possible. After having undergone massive losses during its speculative peak, its vision fund has rebounded in 2025, declaring quarterly profits of $ 2.9 billion, reinforced by assets favored by AI like Nvidia and Couang.

These gains not only feed Wall Street’s renewed enthusiasm for SoftBank’s history, but also its ability to invest directly, by building and having the physical infrastructure which allows AI to adapt.

The risks remain late in execution

SoftBank has publicly recognized Stargate’s challenges, including funding delays, alignment with partners and site selection. The initiates of the industry note that six months after the launch of the project, not a single operational data center launched, giving birth to skepticism as for the magnitude of SoftBank.

In addition to this, the wider geopolitical landscape – export controls on semiconductors to the failure of the failure of foreign capital – projects a long shadow on all levels dependent on rapid material deployment.

The strategic game – and what to look at then

Softbank’s Ohio Buy is a tangible sign, it anchors AI infrastructure with active active world. Analysts now see Lordstown not only as a factory, but as a point of view in the American backbone of AI. Some people believe that its success will depend on SoftBank’s ability to follow, unlock partners’ financing, clean up regulatory obstacles and provide a data center or usable calculation capacity.

If this is the case, the Lordstown factory will not be a dream of failure of electric vehicles, but as the launch of the next industrial era: a power not fueled by power but by exaflops and artificial intelligence.