Amazon is building a new $87 million data center in Portage.
The Seattle-based retail giant, which also runs the highly lucrative Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform that caters largely to businesses and other large institutions, is constructing a new data center in the AmeriPlex at the Port business park north of Interstate 94 and south of the Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor on Lake Michigan.
"Ground has been broken. They've been working on it, building it out there," Portage Mayor Sue Lynch said. "They're getting all that high-tech equipment there."
The data center will start with 10 employees who will make at least $100,000 a year.
"It's not as many jobs as an Amazon warehouse, but they're high-paying jobs," Lynch said. "These are the technology jobs we've been working to bring more of to Portage."
The city has been working to bring Amazon to Portage for two and a half years, though the company's identity was not initially disclosed to the city by its site selection consultants.
"We try to encourage investment even though we didn't know what they wanted at first," Lynch said. "We ended up getting a data center."
Portage is offering Amazon tax breaks on its $35 million building and its $52 million worth of IT equipment. The new development will still pay $7.5 million in property tax revenue over the next decade.
Amazon first came to Northwest Indiana after Gary and Hammond made pitches for its coveted second headquarters, which ended up going to Arlington, Virginia, just outside of D.C. It temporarily operated a last-mile delivery station off Interstate 65 in Gary before building out its 190,000-square-foot delivery station in the AmeriPlex at the Crossroads business park along Broadway in Merrillville.
It had planned to open a second warehouse in Valparaiso but mothballed that project.
The company has gone on to open Amazon lockers all across the Region, including in the Schererville Whole Foods and the River Oaks Center in Calumet City.
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