New Albany, a wealthy Franklin County exurb northeast of Columbus, Ohio, is the state hub for data centers. Since Meta debuted its first Ohio data center in 2017, Amazon, Google, and others have appeared on the scene and converted thousands of undeveloped acres in the town into dozens of sprawling data center campuses.
Ohio is one of the top locations for data centers in the country, and the Columbus metro area has the second-most data centers owned by massive hyperscale tech companies like Amazon and Google, according to a report produced for the Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation.
Investment in the warehouse-sized buildings packed with servers, the computers that provide data and other resources to the computers that power the internet, makes up a larger portion of the economy than consumer spending. Artificial intelligence drives much of the demand for data centers, and tech firms want to get them up and running as fast as possible to cash in on the AI boom.
But ultimately, residential ratepayers pay for data centers’ voracious electricity consumption. In Ohio’s “Silicon Heartland,” tech companies enjoy the benefits of lax regulation and tax exemptions while community members see increasingly unaffordable energy prices as well as environmental harms that they are only just beginning to understand.
Ohioans are paying an average of $42 more a month for electricity than they did in 2021, according to a November 2025 report from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. Several factors contribute to the cost increases that have burdened residents of the PJM Interconnection region, the country’s largest regional transmission organization that oversees the electric grid for Ohio, 12 other states, and the District of Columbia.
One reason for the increase is the spike in natural gas prices, due to a higher demand for energy as well as utility spending on modernizing gas infrastructure. But Monitoring Analytics, which has been described as akin to an “ombudsman” for PJM, has argued that it’s “misleading” to say that rising electricity prices are just a reflection of supply and demand.
The largest increase that customers see on utility bills stems from capacity costs. PJM forecasts the total amount of electricity that consumers need to ensure that there will be reliable power, and then holds a capacity auction. Energy providers then confirm that the electricity will be available when required. Last year, capacity prices soared, which Monitoring Analytics says is “almost entirely the result” of new energy demands from data centers. Utility companies also reap huge profits by passing the costs of infrastructure upgrades on to ratepayers.
Over the next decade, data centers are expected to eat up much of the new electricity generated in the state. Monitoring Analytics filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the end of last year, warning that if PJM continues to connect large data centers to the electrical grid there won’t be enough energy for all uses.
PJM’s forecasts also include the demand for future data centers, putting “ratepayers in Ohio on the hook for that load in the capacity markets,” says Noah Dormady, an Ohio State University associate professor of public policy. He compares it to hosting a party: PJM asks data centers to RSVP, so it knows how much food to order, but only half show up. Now the extra food goes uneaten—but the host has already paid for all of it.
But the state has taken notice. After a legal settlement last July, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio ordered data centers to pay for some of their future energy asks even if they don’t ultimately require it.
NEW ALBANY RESIDENT LES WEXNER, the founder of The New Albany Company, a real estate development firm, has profited from the data center boom. A 2025 Forbes investigation found that Wexner made $2 billion from his investments in the AI infrastructure and cloud computing firm CoreWeave. (The former Victoria’s Secret CEO is also known for once employing Jeffrey Epstein as his “personal money manager.”)
Amazon Web Services, Google, Intel, and Meta all own lots in The New Albany Company’s business park, a hub for the Central Ohio data center boom. Microsoft is investing $420 million in a New Albany data center, and Meta plans to open its one-gigawatt Prometheus AI cluster housed in five or more buildings and related sites this year.
Many of these projects obtain approvals without much public scrutiny, so residents often don’t learn anything about data center siting decisions until the deal is done. “Limiting the information you provide is the optimal solution, but may require frank conversations with your counterparty to determine what information they really need,” suggest two lawyers employed by Vorys, an Ohio-based law firm that has helped data centers win tax breaks. As one Microsoft lawyer put it in a recent law firm webinar: “Nobody really wants a data center in their backyard.”
In its pre-Meta years, Facebook operated under the name “Sidecat LLC” in 2017 while seeking tax breaks for its New Albany facility and has in the past sought to stay in the shadows on data center projects, according to Data Centre Dynamics, a British online data center magazine. Only after state lawmakers approved $37 million in tax breaks did then-Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) reveal that Facebook was the company.
Ohio’s data centers can benefit from tax breaks at every level of government. Companies that invest at least $100 million in their facilities can apply to the Ohio Tax Credit Authority for a full state sales tax exemption, 15-year property tax abatements of 75 to 100 percent, and job creation tax credits.
At the local level, New Albany’s data centers benefit from Community Reinvestment Areas (CRAs), managed by city and county officials, which exempts new construction in designated areas from local property taxes. Law firms have also supported campaigns friendly to their tech clients. Vorys says that its attorneys have “helped at least 15 clients negotiate tax incentives and other economic development incentives on scores of hyperscale data center projects in 13 states.”
The New Albany City Council has smoothed the way for tech firms, exempting both Microsoft and Meta from local property taxes for 15 years. Amazon Web Services got a 30-year tax abatement, paying zero dollars for 15 years to start and then 75 percent for the next 15, along with other tax breaks. New Albany, according to a Business Insider 2025 investigation, gave up millions in both local and state tax revenues at one Meta data center. Notably, Microsoft has pledged to reject local tax breaks and pay its fair share of electric bills.
Last year, Policy Matters Ohio reported that state lawmakers had approved roughly $282 million in state tax breaks for data center development. Zach Schiller, the research director at Policy Matters Ohio, says that coming up with the real number is difficult because while “companies are required to make annual reports on the value of these exemptions,” they’re not required to divulge those figures.
The Ohio Chamber of Commerce estimates that from 2017 to 2024, tax breaks have cost the state $2.5 billion—which works out to a cost of $1.1 million for each of the nearly 37,000 jobs related to data center operations, which included 19,400 temporary construction jobs. While the report estimates that 130,000 jobs might eventually be supported by data centers, Schiller says the true contribution to the state’s economy “is a fraction of what’s described.”
OHIO STATE AND LOCAL LAWMAKERS have been slow to respond to residents who’ve voiced concerns about noisy data centers under construction less than 1,000 feet from homes, and the polluting natural gas generators that will power them. Ohio has passed few AI regulations, but state lawmakers have warned that President Trump’s executive order calling for “minimally burdensome” AI policies would “create problems for localities in Ohio” and “at the very moment when communities are seeking responsive solutions.”
In Granville, Ohio, a small town about 15 miles east of New Albany, Ken Apacki worries about how tech companies are steering large projects to communities that aren’t equipped to handle them. The longtime resident has been monitoring the pollution produced by diesel-powered generators and the ongoing construction at Intel’s $28 billion semiconductor facility, which President Joe Biden called “a literal field of dreams” during his 2023 State of the Union address.
For Granville and neighboring Alexandria, Intel’s semiconductor plant poses an immediate threat: At a community meeting, Granville Mayor Melissa Hartfield warned residents, “We’re paying to poison ourselves, is in essence what we’re doing.”
Apacki launched his monitoring project in 2023 when The Shelly Company, a paving firm looking to profit from the Intel-funded construction boom, tried to build two asphalt plants in Alexandria. About 300 trucks a day would have overwhelmed the small community with traffic, noise, and air pollution. Apacki and others brought their concerns to the county planning commission—which unanimously rejected the proposals. Meanwhile, Apacki and a team of volunteers have been working on a community air monitoring network, setting up air quality monitors around the town to measure pollutants.
When Apacki mentioned his plans to an engineer for the data center firm EdgeConneX, they told him that since air quality monitors hadn’t been set up around the natural gas generators built next to data centers, it would be hard to prove the data centers are responsible for pollution. Apacki plans to install more monitors to evaluate current air quality before the data centers come online.
Opposition to the facilities is slowly coalescing. Some Central Ohio towns have pushed back against the data centers, and doubts about the tax breaks have seeped into the legislature. Democratic and Republican state lawmakers have backed repealing the facilities’ sales tax exemptions; Gov. Mike DeWine (R) vetoed a 2025 bill. But this year, the Republicans who control both chambers may back an override.
Unless Ohioans recognize the risks of inviting data centers into their communities, and end the automatic tax breaks, residents of Ohio’s Silicon Heartland will continue to subsidize the richest companies in the world and pay the environmental and economic costs. The most obvious effects—higher electricity bills, smog, and contaminated water—would only become clear after the data centers and the industrial plants are up and running. That seems to be what tech giants are counting on.
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