Dive Brief:
- Providing more evidence that the data center boom is alive and well, Google broke ground on a $2 billion data center campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on April 26, according to the office of Gov. Eric J. Holcomb. No contractor has been announced.
- The Indiana Economic Development Corp. promised the Mountain View, California-based tech giant sweeteners in the form of tax credits to locate its facility in the northeast corner of the state. IEDC will give Google a 35-year data center sales tax exemption for the first $800 million invested, with options for a longer tax holiday, in five-year increments, for each additional $800 million invested, up to 50 years.
- In its own announcement, Google said it would bring its Skilled Trades and Readiness program to the area. The STAR program offers paid training and networking opportunities to help participants move directly into Google data center construction jobs.
Dive Insight:
The announcement came just a day after Amazon announced an $11 billion investment — also spurred by $100 million in tax credits and other incentives — to build its own data center campus in north central Indiana. That news came on the heels earlier this year from Meta about its own $800 million data center campus in Jeffersonville, Indiana, where Turner Construction recently broke ground.
Holcomb’s office took the opportunity of the Google investment to highlight the state’s attractiveness for other data center players. The state said it is an “ideal hub for data storage due to its business-friendly environment, abundance of infrastructure resources, availability of skilled labor and growing technology and semiconductor sectors.”
As demand for artificial intelligence and other new technologies ramp up the need for more computing power, construction of data centers continues to boom. Along with Google, Amazon and Meta, Austin, Texas-based Oracle recently announced its own $10 billion data center expansion plan.
