A developer is planning to build a massive 1.2 million-square-foot data center in Merrillville that could result in up to $600 million in investment.
Chicago-based Wylie Capital has been planning for years to develop the 1.5 million-square-foot Merrillville Commerce Center at Broadway, 93rd Avenue and Georgia Street in Merrillville. It's now looking to build six buildings totaling nearly 1.2 million square feet that would house data centers at that site.
Each building would be two or three stories high, standing 50 to 75 feet high. Wyle Capital has an 87-acre site it acquired from a few landowners in four different transactions.
Each building could cost about $100 million to build, said Jason Simon with Wylie Capital. The total investment is expected to be up to $600 million once fully built out.
Simon presented the plan to the Data Center Citizen Advisory Committee in the Merrillville Town Hall Wednesday evening. He said the firm was switching focus from a business park that would be home to an industrial and logistics company to a data center park, given how fast demand has accelerated for data centers in recent years.
"Four years ago, there wasn't this demand for data centers in Northwest Indiana," he said. "Data centers were only in four or five markets, like Chicago. But things have changed. We're all on our cell phones all the time. Our whole world is on that little screen, wherever we are. There's also been the rise of AI and other technological advances. The demand for data centers has increased nationally."
The Merrillville Data Advisory Center gave preliminary approval to the development Wednesday.
The project will result in 100 to 200 high-paying jobs, Simon said. Many will pay six figures.
"These are highly technical jobs for highly educated workers," he said.
The proposed data center is near Pinnacle Hospital, which would draw its power from different transmission lines. NIPSCO is now putting together a report on how much power it will be able to provide to the site and on what schedule.
The new data center will use an estimated 1 million gallons of water to cool the computers. Wylie Capital has been in talks with Indiana American Water about supplying the water.
Plans call for starting construction on two of the data centers at first and then building the rest one by one as demand warrants.
The hyperscale data center likely would supply power to a large company like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta or Oracle. The companies build their own data centers but also rent space at data centers.
"They would be building data centers everywhere if they could right now," he said. "But they have shareholders to answer to and can't spend all their capital at once."
Data centers have been interested in Northwest Indiana in part because Blackstone Group acquired a share of NIPSCO and is seen as having the deep pockets to be able to fund new infrastructure.
"They would be able to build out the infrastructure and not tax the residents $25 one at a time," he said.
Stephen Muenstermann, the president of Cloudbusters and a Data Center Citizen Advisory Committee member, said the data centers could bring major economic benefits to the town.
"I'm really excited. I've seen the ripple effects data centers can have in the community," he said. "Every time it lands in a community, that community prospers. I've seen it happen in Charlotte and Raleigh. They get overhauled."
Two other data centers are planned in Merrillville. KARIS Critical is planning up to $900 million in investment in a data center on 180 acres on 101st Avenue east of Deep River. Another developer plans to present plans for a data center at Merrillville near Colorado Street and Harms Road to the Data Center Advisory Committee at 6 p.m. Thursday at Merrillville Town Hall.
"There's a last-mile demand so there isn't latency," Muenstermann said. "Now we only have the data center in Hammond where the power plant used to be. But that's serving more of the Chicago market and probably the casinos."
Residents raised some potential concerns, such as a potential hum and whether it could disrupt electric service to the hospital.
Data centers do not generate a significant amount of traffic and do not have semi-trailer trucks coming in and out the way business parks do, Town Council President Rick Bella said. They would not be big users of municipal services.
"It looks like a ghost town," Bella said. "There's not a lot of traffic. It looks like closed buildings. Regular warehousing would attract a lot more traffic with garage doors and so on."
Randy Palmateer, the business manager of the Northwestern Indiana Building and Construction Trades Council, said it likely would result in many construction jobs.
"We're excited for the work," he said. "Data centers are big right now."
Demand for data centers is currently so strong that they used to have about 23% capacity available for rental but that's down to around 1.9%.
"If you want to have data processed in the United States, it's hard to find anywhere to do it," Muenstermann said. "If they build it, businesses will come in around it. This is a magnet that attracts big business."