U.S. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) criticized President Donald Trump for allowing SB Energy, a subsidiary of the Japanese company SoftBank, to build “the world’s largest Artificial Intelligence data center” on federal land, two months after the company donated $50 million to Trump’s presidential library fund.
The data center will be built at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Portsmouth site, a decommissioned uranium enrichment site in Piketon, Ohio (population 2,110). Trump’s library is being built in Miami, Florida.
[NOTE: In March, the U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Commerce announced a public-private partnership with SoftBank, permitting SB Energy to build a data center using up to 10 GW of energy—enough electricity to power around 10,000,000 homes—on federal land. Democratic lawmakers Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) characterized the deal as “circumventing normal permitting requirements and other regulatory processes for what will be one of the largest data centers in the U.S.”]
Khanna wrote on social media: “We will expose and put an end to this pay to play when we win back the House.”
SoftBank, a Japanese company, gave $50 million to Trump’s library.
Months later, the administration announced a deal allowing SoftBank to build a data center on federal land.
We will expose and put an end to this pay to play when we win back the House.https://t.co/gYWWBPaDZo
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) August 28, 2026
Warren, Blumenthal, and U.S. Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) also said in a statement: “This sequence of events raises significant concerns about potential corruption, and whether SoftBank’s donation was an attempt to buy favorable treatment from President Trump and the Trump Administration.”
While Warren noted Trump isn’t the first president to accept “suspicious donations while in office” for their presidential libraries, she added that “Trump is doing so at a magnitude that makes glaringly clear the need for common-sense guardrails around donations.”