Softbank recently announced that it will buy a stake in Intel worth $2 billion. In the meantime, it has also reportedly purchased one of Foxconn’s factories in Ohio, which aims to build components for the Stargate artificial intelligence data center, a joint project between them and OpenAI.
The factory, located in the city of Lordstown, Ohio, was previously owned by Foxconn, and was used to manufacture electric cars sold in the United States. Foxconn confirmed the acquisition yesterday, and said that even though it is now owned by Softbank, Foxconn will still operate at the location, and produce AI data center components for Softbank.
Softbank paid Foxconn $375 million for the factory and land, which is 6.2 million square feet in size and will be used exclusively for the production of components for the Stargate data center project.
Foxconn factory acquisitions are nothing new. The company's chairman, Young Liu, said that discussions for the acquisition have been going on for the past six months, and that everything was done to ensure that both companies had enough time to raise money for this investment and also to get the factory ready to start manufacturing data center components as soon as possible.
Foxconn is technically already the world's largest AI equipment manufacturer, but the scale of the Ohio factory acquisition is unique even for them, as the factory will produce data center parts specifically for the Stargate AI data center project, which has a goal of building a $500 billion data center network over the next few years.