A data center campus is set to be built in Van Wert, Ohio.
As reported by local press, the data center will be located on 220 acres of the 1,500 ‘Mega Site’ land parcel if the deal goes ahead.
Van Wert Area Economic Development Corporation executive director Brent Stevens said he could not confirm names.
The deal could take up to 360 days to close, but Stevens said the unnamed company hopes to close on the property and begin construction sooner.
The proposed facility might require up to 1.7 million gallons of water per day for cooling purposes and 500MW of electricity. AEP Ohio has been in talks with the company, according to the report.
Other specifications have not been shared.
Van Wert’s Mega Site property, owned by the Marsh Foundation, is located between Highway 30, Gilliland Road, and Marsh Road in Van Wert county. The site is being sold and/or leased out to potential tenants in smaller parcels for around $51,000 per acre.
As part of the deal, the unnamed data center developer will have to construct a connector road between Stripe Road and Mendon Road.
Ohio has become a recent hotspot for data center operators, with the majority concentrated in the state capital Columbus. Cologix, Centersquare, Edged, Cogent, Stack, AWS, Microsoft, Vantage, Google, DataBank, and Meta all have a presence in Columbus.
Around 30 miles from Van Wert County in Lima, a mystery data center company was reportedly considering a 170-acre site between Beery and Irvin Roads in December last year.
Microsoft was previously exploring developing a data center campus in Lima, around nearby Perry Township. However, the company announced it had backed out of the project in October. It’s unclear if Microsoft is behind either of these new proposals in the region.
AWS has a very large presence in Ohio and is planning to invest an estimated $7.8 billion by the end of 2029/2030 on data centers in Ohio.
In November 2024, the tech giant announced plans to build a $2 billion data center campus in Sunbury, Central Ohio. The company purchased land for the project at the end of last month.
