Lordstown’s Second Act: AI Dreams, Nuclear Reality, and the Factory That Refuses to Die

By Nancy Carrington, eGeneration News

LORDSTOWN, OH — The old GM giant on Hallock-Young Road—6.2 million square feet of Ohio grit and muscle—has been sold again. Foxconn’s onetime EV hub quietly changed hands last week to a Delaware shell called “Crescent Dune LLC.” Bloomberg and Reuters now report the mystery buyer is SoftBank, which wants the complex for AI server manufacturing tied to the $500 billion “Stargate” data-center push with OpenAI and Oracle. Land and buildings fetched about $88 million, with another $287 million for equipment—pennies on the dollar for a site this size. (Reuters, TechCrunch, Bloomberg.com, Car and Driver)

Here’s the rest of the story: Lordstown has been the political football of two presidencies. GM shuttered the plant in 2019 after decades of compact-car output, gutting the Mahoning Valley. The Trump White House spotlighted Lordstown Motors soon after—complete with a South Lawn photo-op—before Foxconn ultimately bought the factory in 2022. Now, in 2025, data centers and AI have replaced electric trucks as the promise du jour. History rhymes; it doesn’t repeat. (tribtoday.com, Trump White House Archives, Reuters)

SoftBank’s reported purchase fits the politics and the power math. Trump’s January announcement of “Stargate” set off a land-rush for water, power, fiber, and square footage. In May, the administration signed a suite of executive orders—including EO 14299—explicitly directing agencies to accelerate advanced nuclear and harden U.S. energy for AI-era loads. The message from Washington is unambiguous: build fast, build resilient, and build here. (Just Security, Federal Register, The White House)

What about the people already working inside those walls? Foxconn says operations will continue, but Monarch Tractor—the last surviving contract build on the floor—faces uncertainty under new ownership. The plant is “gigafactory-class” in scale, but even a Tesla-sized vision needs a workforce and a plan. Lordstown has both; it’s the plan that keeps changing. (Car and Driver)

Why eGeneration says Lordstown should manufacture nuclear—now

The eGeneration Foundation considers Lordstown one of three “North Coast” sites ideal for building Gen-IV reactor components—alongside NASA’s 6,400-acre Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky and the former U.S. Republic Steel site in Lorain, with an Ottawa County option near Davis-Besse. In blunt terms: Ohio could have the perfect platform to stage, fabricate, test, and ship world-class nuclear hardware from such an Ohio facility—and do it quickly. With facilities already built in the case of the Lordstown facility, Ohio, could move at warp speed to capture advanced reactor manufacturing production.

“While the massive Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky has plenty of space for an advanced nuclear manufacturing facility, and so does the U.S. Republic Steel site in Lorain and another site in Ottawa County near Davis-Besse, we saw the Lordstown facility as closer to a plug-and-play option,” said Don Larson, director at eGeneration. He emphasized these are manufacturing sites—no nuclear materials on premises. Fueling the reactors would occur elsewhere (likely at the destination site).

William H. Thesling, Ph.D., who advises both eGeneration and is a member of the Ohio Nuclear Development Authority (ONDA), is frustrated at the slow pace in Columbus. The legislature authorized ONDA in 2023, but it launched with no funds and with narrowed legislative language that has not provided much guidance to the Authority members—bureaucracy that moves like molasses while the world sprints toward energy-hungry AI.

Jon Morrow, eGeneration’s economist, is blunter: the Ohio Department of Development still behaves as if “renewables and efficiency” are an energy strategy, not a side dish—which is why our grid costs rise while reliability falls. Wind and solar complicate the grid and fail the test of stewardship: they consume land, scatter intermittency, and shift costs onto working families without solving the baseload problem. Ohio needs a plan rooted in physics, not feelings. (That’s an opinion eGeneration owns—and it’s why we’re pressing for ONDA to move more quickly.)

The union question—and the Tesla rumor

Local chatter suggests Lordstown would be an ideal location for Tesla, but a rumor claims Elon Musk is hesitant to invest because the region’s workforce strongly supports unionization. There’s no public confirmation of any Tesla-Lordstown talks today; call this scuttlebutt with a kernel of plausibility given Musk’s long, documented skepticism toward unions. He’s fought union drives from Fremont to Buffalo to Berlin and says plainly that if Tesla ever unionizes, it’s because management failed. That stance alone makes a deeply union-rooted valley a tough fit. (Yahoo Finance, Electrek, AP News)

The fork in the road

So, which future should Ohio choose for Lordstown: another turn on the hype wheel, or the sober industry that actually underwrites modern civilization?

Data centers are coming everywhere. They soak up power and water, then leave towns to fight about utility bills. If SoftBank’s Stargate path lands here, we welcome the jobs—but we should insist on ironclad power arrangements that don’t socialize costs onto ratepayers. Better yet, pair that demand with supply: use Lordstown to manufacture the small and large modular reactors (SMRs and LMRs) needed to keep AI’s lights on. Build the tools that power the tools. That’s how you create durable prosperity.

"ONDA was created for this moment. It needs teeth—basic funding, permitting muscle, and a mandate to establish an Ohio Nuclear Development Consortium that can buy or master-lease Lordstown’s floor space, sublet to reactor OEMs, and stand up a world-class advanced manufacturing training center. The law’s scaffolding exists; now we either climb it or let opportunity pass to Texas, Virginia, or Norway. "

A final word, as simple as Sunday truth

We are commanded to steward—not squander—what we inherit. Lordstown is an inheritance: skilled hands, a cathedral of steel, rail spurs and interstates at its feet. Use it to build the machines that keep hospitals cold, steel mills molten, and, yes, even data centers honest. Ohio has the sites. Washington has cleared the regulatory brush. The only missing piece is resolve.

Have a tip on Ohio nuclear manufacturing or Lordstown’s next tenant? Contact the eGeneration desk.

Donald Trump stands with Foxconn founder Terry Gou and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son in 2018.Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg