Datacenters are popping up left and right in the state of Ohio, and that might be a sign of more to come.
Data centers are all the rage right now. Maybe you’ve heard of them, but maybe you don’t know quite what they are aside from something that AI needs.
Welp, we want to talk about that in this article. But first, let’s tell you what’s going on. First reported by WSAZ, a company operating under the name “Tilted Gate LLC” is eyeing a 500,000-square-foot facility in Scioto County. The proposed site sits in the Franklin Furnace area, specifically Haverhill, right along the Ohio River near the Kentucky border.
Here’s the head-turning part of the story: it would cost a whopping $1 billion or so to create the new datacenter. Local officials say the developer is seeking a 75% tax abatement over 15 years through a PILOT agreement that would pay the county $500,000 annually.
This is more evidence that Ohio is becoming a hub for data centers. Tech giants Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta all have a presence in the state, with most large-scale builds clustered around Columbus. Developers like QTS, Vantage, CyrusOne, and EdgeConneX are expanding there as well. One has to believe this mystery LLC is from a similar-sized company because not just anyone can spend $1 billion on something like this unless you’re deep-pocketed.
Alright, but what the heck are these data centers anyway? Let’s switch to the rest of this article because if the trend continues in Ohio, you’ll want to truly understand what’s going on.
What Are Data Centers Actually?
This is perhaps an overly simple explanation, but we don’t really want to confuse anyone. At its most basic level, a data center is a building filled with servers. Think of servers as very powerful computers designed to store, process, and transmit digital information. It’s not your typical computer that you’d use at home. No, no, bigger than that. Inside the data centers, the computers are stacked in rows of metal racks, connected by miles of fiber and cabling, and engineered to run nonstop.
You’re probably thinking, “why are these things even used?” Here’s an easy-to-understand use case: every time you stream a movie, upload a photo to Instagram, send an email, make a wager on a top mobile betting app, browse the web on SportsBettingSites.com, or use an AI tool, your request travels to one of these facilities. The server processes the request and sends the data back to your device in seconds. This happens billions and billions of times per day, all invisible to you when using a phone or computer, but it’s what keeps the Internet functioning.
Oftentimes, you’ll hear about this happening “on the cloud” — a magical online world that handles and stores it all. Yes, that’s true, but there’s a real, physical component (concrete floors, steel frames, cooling systems, etc.) to those clouds, and that’s living inside data centers across Ohio, the country, and the world.
Just like factory floors powered the industrial evolution, data centers are fueling the Internet and AI age. It’s the latter reason for why data centers are really starting to become important, as we’ll explain in the next section.
The inside of a data center. As you can see, these are no regular servers, hency why datacenters cost so much.
Why AI Is Driving Datacenter Demand
The Internet has been around for the past 30 or so years, so why are data centers all of a sudden this important and worth spending a billion dollars on? It’s because AI has entered the picture.
Before AI, data centers mostly handled things like email, streaming video, online shopping, and cloud storage. That’s heavy traffic, sure, but it’s relatively predictable. You click play on a Netflix movie, data gets sent to your device. You upload a photo of your cat, it gets stored somewhere.
AI is the polar opposite of that. Instead of simply storing or delivering data, AI systems are constantly calculating. When you type a prompt into an AI tool, it’s running layers of mathematical models to predict what comes next. Multiply that by millions of users at the same time, and suddenly you’re talking about an enormous spike in computing demand that can’t be handled with the infrastructure we currently have.
But wait, that’s not all. AI isn’t just doing, it’s learning, and that requires just as much compute. Before an AI model answers a question you prompted it, it has to be trained on massive datasets. That training requires thousands of specialized chips running in sync for weeks or months, possibly years. Obviously, that’s a huge drain on electricity and heat, something only a datacenter could possibly handle.
This is why you’re seeing Meta, Microsoft, and other tech leaders throw endless money on “capital expenditures” like building more data centers. It’s all one giant cycle. More AI usage equals more computing power. More computing power means more servers. More servers mean bigger buildings with stronger electrical infrastructure.
This is why the Scioto Valley datacenter will cost a billion dollars. These things are huge, and the physical stuff in it are not cheap. But of course, the hope is that AI usage ends up being worth the spend (that is still to be determined).
What This Means for Scioto County
Alright, you’re probably reading all this and thinking, “what’s in it for Scioto County? Is all this buildout just for our AI overlords gain?” Well, not exactly. There are some direct benefits to the local economy and workers.
First of all, this stuff needs to be constructed. We mean, we just laid out how intricate these data centers are. So you’ll need construction workers, electricians, engineers, and a bunch of more experts working on it. That means temporary jobs and local spending while the facility is being developed.
Admittedly, this is a short-term spike. Long-term, data centers aren’t massive employers the way traditional factories were. Once up and running, many facilities run with a relatively small full-time staff — often focused on maintenance, security, and network operations. The real economic value tends to come more from infrastructure investment and tax revenue than from large payrolls.
Still, landing a billion-dollar facility would signal something important: Scioto County would officially be part of the digital backbone powering AI and cloud computing. That’s not a nothingburger in our eyes.