Ohio data centers

At a glance

Where they are

Ohio's data center map has two very different faces. Franklin County, anchored by Columbus, has the largest raw count of sites — 40 — but a large share of that is small colocation space: carrier-hotel rooms and legacy telecom buildings downtown, plus office-tower tenants like the Borden Building at 180 E. Broad St. That inflates the county's operating count without describing much new land use.

The land-consuming story is next door, in Licking County, where 22 sites include 11 of Ohio's 22 active construction projects. The New Albany corridor there has become the center of gravity for the industry: Google's Hartman Farm/Lockbourne campus, Meta's New Albany and Prometheus/Beech Road buildings, Microsoft's three-campus New Albany/Heath/Hebron commitment, Amazon's expansion set, Intel's Ohio One chip fab (not a data center itself, but the anchor that drew the power and land infrastructure), Vantage's OH1 campus, EdgeConneX's converted warehouse and QTS's Babbitt/Miller buildings all sit within a few miles of one another.

Beyond the Columbus region, Cuyahoga County (18 sites, largely Cleveland-area colocation and carrier hotels), Hamilton County (14, centered on Cincinnati), Summit County (9, Akron), Butler County (7, a fast-growing corridor around Hamilton, Trenton and West Chester Township) and Montgomery County (7, Dayton) round out the larger clusters. Smaller but consequential single projects are scattered statewide: the SoftBank/OpenAI Stargate campus on the old GM Lordstown assembly-plant site in Trumbull County, a proposed Amazon campus on the retired J.M. Stuart coal-plant site in Adams County, a proposed energy-and-data campus on the retired W.H. Sammis coal-plant site in Jefferson County, and a proposed conversion of the shuttered Pixelle paper mill in Chillicothe, Ross County.

Coordinates in this inventory were checked, not assumed. Several aggregator sources place towns in the wrong county entirely — one lists Ashville in Franklin County when it is in Pickaway, Millersport in Licking when it is in Fairfield, Jeffersonville in Franklin when it is in Fayette, Hannibal in Guernsey when it is in Monroe, and Oregon in Henry when it is in Lucas. Every point behind this inventory was re-geocoded against the U.S. Census Bureau's own address and boundary services rather than copied from any single tracker.

Madison County, sitting directly between the Franklin cluster and the Union County Amazon and Meta sites, has no confirmed project in this inventory at all — a gap researchers flag as more likely to be a miss than a genuine absence, given how quietly some of these deals get assembled before they are announced.

Who is building, and how much

Amazon Web Services is the largest single operator by site count, with 14 tracked Ohio sites spanning Hilliard, Dublin, New Albany, Marysville, Sunbury, Sidney, Wilmington, Adams County and elsewhere. Lumen Technologies (10 sites, legacy telecom colocation), CyrusOne (7), Cologix (6), ark data centers (6), Expedient (5), Google (5) and Meta (5) follow. Reported megawatt figures across the inventory total in the tens of thousands, but the number is not a clean measurement: some figures are IT load, some are the utility interconnection request a developer files years before any equipment arrives, and some are simple marketing round numbers. The gap between the tracked operating fleet (roughly 1,700 MW) and the projects already under construction (over 15,000 MW) is itself telling — the small, already-built colocation rooms carry little power, while the new hyperscale wave under construction, mostly in Licking County, dwarfs it.

The tax-credit paper trail tells a similar story about scale. Primary Ohio Tax Credit Authority meeting minutes, downloaded directly rather than taken from summaries, document a combined Cologix data-center sales-tax exemption (COL5 in Orange Township, Delaware County, and a Johnstown, Licking County campus) approved June 1, 2026 — a 50 percent exemption for 10 years tied to a reported $1.17 billion investment, 90 jobs and $10 million in new payroll. That was, per the state's own timeline, the last such exemption the Authority approved before Governor Mike DeWine directed it to stop taking new applications.

Earlier primary awards include Microsoft's combined New Albany, Heath and Hebron campuses (October 28, 2024: 100 percent exemption for 15 years, $1 billion investment, 20 jobs), EdgeConneX's New Albany campus and The Constant Company's (Vultr) Springfield project, both approved the same day, October 27, 2025 (50 percent for 10 years each, $1 billion and roughly $901.3 million respectively), and two ark data centers awards in Akron and Independence approved March 2, 2026. Cumulative company totals reported by Signal Ohio, though not tied to a single dated approval, put Google's Ohio data-center exemptions around $600 million over 40 years across its Columbus, New Albany and Lancaster campuses, Vantage's around $83 million, and QTS's around $73 million. Company-announced investment figures recorded across roughly 20 companies — separate from the tax-credit paperwork — sum to tens of billions of dollars, led by a reported $23.87 billion Amazon figure and multibillion-dollar figures from Google, Meta, Cologix, Vantage and SoftBank/OpenAI's Stargate venture. Treat all of these totals as as-announced and not always reconcilable to a single project: Microsoft's $1 billion, for example, covers three campuses whose individual figures do not sum to it.

Land buyers and shell companies

Because the data-center industry routes land purchases through anonymous shell entities before any project is announced, part of tracking this sector is watching county auditor deed records for names that have been tied — sometimes confirmed, sometimes only reported — to a known operator. Meta has used "Sidecat LLC" in Ohio since 2017, when it sought New Albany tax breaks under that name; Sidecat bought land at 3439-3445 Clover Valley Road for $42 million on December 24, 2025, and spent $167.4 million on about 429 acres in New Albany and Jersey Township in the following days. Google's Columbus campus was built under Magellan Enterprises LLC, whose 2021 city tax-abatement vote reportedly went through before Columbus City Council learned of the Google connection.

Some entity attributions remain unresolved. No Ohio news story, filing or county record was found naming a Google entity called "Jet Stream LLC," despite the name circulating in reporting on the sector. Whether "LightHouse CLT01" and "Logistix Hamilton" describe the same Butler County site, and whether the Van Wert site belongs to Thor Equities/Form8tion or QTS, are both open questions in the underlying records. Land assemblies that are confirmed against live county parcel data include Stargate Lordstown, where CRESCENT DUNE LLC — a SoftBank subsidiary shell — bought four parcels totaling 599.5866 acres at the former GM Lordstown assembly plant in one $88 million sale on September 24, 2025, and HashWorks Powered Land Waterford LLC, which assembled 44 parcels (905.8 acres) in Waterford Township, Washington County, across 12 deeds between April and July 2026 for $42,595,700 — including a single 274.7-acre, $20 million deed that matches public reporting almost exactly.

The power and water it needs

The power side of this story is visible in state utility filings. In a Public Utilities Commission of Ohio case (24-508-EL-ATA), AEP Ohio told the commission it had more than 50 data centers in its interconnection queue representing more than 30,000 megawatts of new demand, overwhelmingly in central Ohio. PUCO adopted a new tariff effective July 9, 2025, requiring new data centers above 25 megawatts (and crypto or mobile operations above 1 megawatt) to pay for at least 85 percent of the load they request — a rule meant to keep speculative interconnection requests from landing on other ratepayers' bills. AEP has since reported its pipeline has more than halved, which suggests a real share of the announced megawattage was never going to be built as filed.

Water use, by contrast, is smaller than the moratorium debates might suggest — at least where it can be measured. A statewide search of Ohio's water-withdrawal facility registry (over 3,700 registrations, all industries) found only a handful genuinely tied to a known data center: an Intel Ohio One registration (1.43 million-gallon-per-day capacity, reporting 15.91 million gallons withdrawn in 2024, up sharply from prior years as the chip fab moves toward operation) and four small Amazon Web Services registrations in Dublin, Hilliard and New Albany, each reporting 0 or near-0 actual withdrawal against modest registered capacities. No registration under Google, Meta, Microsoft, Vantage, Cologix, CyrusOne, Aligned, Compass, STACK, DarkByte, Bitdeer or the SoftBank/Stargate names was found anywhere in the statewide file. The likeliest explanation is that most hyperscale campuses use closed-loop or air/immersion cooling systems that never trigger the withdrawal-registration threshold, drawing what water they do need from municipal supply rather than a company-held well.

The bigger water numbers surface at proposed rather than operating sites. Sunbury's proposed Amazon campus was described locally as consuming 7 to 8 percent of Del-Co Water Company's total capacity. The proposed conversion of Chillicothe's shuttered Pixelle paper mill into a data center, part of a wider $1.5 billion redevelopment, is described locally as needing up to 28 million gallons a day at full build. And a proposed 200-megawatt crypto and AI computing site in Waterford Township, Washington County — reportedly tied to Cipher Digital and Sabre 56, though the operator link itself is only reported, not confirmed — sought a 25-million-gallon-a-day surface-water withdrawal from the Muskingum River in March 2026; that registration went inactive in June 2026, a status change worth watching as the project's fate becomes clearer.

Several registered power-plant water rights sit beside data-center sites without any confirmed link to them. The retired W.H. Sammis coal plant in Jefferson County, where a Houston company is proposing an "energy and data center campus," still holds an active 1,424.39-million-gallon-per-day water-withdrawal registration — one of the largest in the state — even though the plant's own actual 2024 withdrawal has collapsed to a fraction of a percent of that capacity. Whether any of that dormant water right would carry over to a new data campus is an open question the public record does not answer.

The moratorium and ballot fights

Local resistance is now, by volume of recorded actions, the biggest single variable shaping which of these projects actually gets built. At least 15 Ohio moratoriums or outright zoning bans tied to data centers have been recorded since 2025: Jerome Township (Union County, nine months from September 2025), Lordstown village (an outright ban in November 2025, later replaced by a six-month moratorium), Washington Township and South Bloomfield, Ashville (six months from December 2025, tied directly to an EdgeConneX project), Maumee and Monclova Township in Lucas County (12 months each, February 2026), Massillon (three separate votes between April and August 2026, ending in a permanent zoning change), Sunbury (roughly ten months, through January 31, 2027, tied to a proposed Amazon campus), Ravenna (12 months from April 2026), Dayton (a six-month moratorium in April 2026 followed by an outright ban in June), Boardman Township (a 12-month ban), a six-township Butler County moratorium adopted June 16, 2026, and a proposed seven-township Fayette County moratorium still under discussion as of September 2026.

Beyond moratoriums, local governments have denied or contested specific proposals outright. Pataskala's planning commission recommended denial of Aligned Data Centers' Mink Street site plan on a 5-2 vote, and city council unanimously (7-0) denied it on August 25, 2026 — though Aligned still owns the land and has not withdrawn. In Butler County, a roughly 601-acre Amazon Web Services campus straddling Madison and St. Clair townships, pursued through a Trenton annexation petition, saw both townships vote to object, and the petitioners withdrew the annexation request on September 14, 2026, hours before a scheduled county commission hearing — reserving the right to refile later. Trenton separately approved Prologis's unrelated, already-built "Project Mila" data-center campus in a ten-minute planning-commission meeting with no public hearing in March 2026.

The ballot box has become the next front. A statewide constitutional amendment banning any data center over 25 megawatts, organized by the group Conserve Ohio, was certified for signature gathering by the Ohio Attorney General in March 2026 but missed the 2026 ballot after collecting only about 70,000 of the roughly 413,000 signatures required; organizers are now aiming for November 2027 instead. Separately, at least eight Ohio cities and villages have their own local charter-amendment measures mirroring that 25-megawatt threshold on the November 3, 2026 general-election ballot, including Sunbury, Pataskala, Oregon (targeting a roughly 500-megawatt Vantage campus), Piqua (targeting a Meta project of roughly 1,400 megawatts, one of five separate Piqua ballot items tied to that deal), Conneaut, Defiance, Granville and Upper Sandusky, plus a stricter 7.5-megawatt threshold in Urbana aimed at a Thor Equities proposal. Two more contested measures — in Trenton and in Sidney, where residents are pursuing a recall tied to an Amazon deal — were ordered onto the ballot by the Ohio Supreme Court but will run as later special elections rather than on November 3, since the state's constitution does not allow adding them to this year's general election on short notice. Wilmington voters, meanwhile, will decide four separate referendums on September 2026 zoning ordinances tied to a roughly $4 billion Amazon Web Services project there.

Sources

• Ohio data center tracker CSV
• dcmap.us — Ohio data centers
• Stop Ohio Data Centers — Franklin County risk profile
• Cologix — Columbus data centers
• TCA Meeting Minutes, June 1, 2026 (Cologix)
• TCA Meeting Minutes, October 28, 2024 (Microsoft)
• Ohio Capital Journal / Cleveland Scene — data centers on the November ballot in 18 Ohio communities
• Monclova Township Board of Trustees statement, December 12, 2025 (PDF)
• Data Center Dynamics — Meta infrastructure partner buys $42M New Albany parcel
• Blue Water Healthy Living — Meta spends $167 million on 429 acres in New Albany and Jersey Township
• Ohio Department of Natural Resources — Water Withdrawal Facility Registration
• Journal-News — Trenton, property owners withdraw annexation petition
• EPA ECHO detailed facility report, CMH072 Campus