
The city of New Albany, Ohio has offered $37 million (approx. £28 million) in tax incentives to a proposed $750 million data centre, according to Columbus Business Report.
The amount includes waiving $36.25 million in sales and use tax on the IT equipment installed in the centre.
The operator, which is aiming to build the city’s ‘largest data centre yet’, is known as Sidecat LLC. The private company provides information technology services including data storage and computing power.
The project is expected to create 50 positions and generate $4 million in new annual payroll. The Tax Credit Authority (TCA) approved a 2%, 10-year job creation tax credit. An estimated $500,000 would be paid yearly to the Licking Heights Local School District under terms of a proposed 15-year, 100% property tax abatement.
The site is 345 acres of city-owned farmland on the east side of Beech Road, south of the Route 161 interchange in Licking County. Currently, the largest data centre in central Ohio belongs to Cologix Inc – a 205 sq. ft facility in North Columbus. The Sidecat LLC data centre would be three times bigger.
The New Albany facility is planned for launch in 2022. It is expected to generate up to $1.4 million in city tax revenue by 2023, which is 8% percent of New Albany’s current general fund budget. The city’s business park has already received $2 billion in investments from corporations.
Currently, there is a total of 72 colocation data centres across ten areas of Ohio. Columbus hosts most of them with 23 facilities, 19 in Cincinnati and 14 in Cleveland.
This week online service provider AOL sold its 65-acre data centre site in Loudoun County, Virginia. The property was bought by New York-based developer company Sentinel Data Centers for $25.2 million. The site is part of a 100-acre AOL campus which is being partly sold by Verizon. Sentinel expects to build up to three data centres within the facility across 2.8 million sq. ft.