The parent company of Facebook has started construction on its $10 billion data center project at the LEAP Research and Innovation District in Lebanon.
Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook and Instagram, made the announcement Wednesday afternoon at the Farmers Bank Fieldhouse in Lebanon, about 6 miles east of the 1,437-acre site where the data center campus will be built. The campus will be situated in the southern portion of the LEAP District, west of Interstate 65 and bisected by State Road 32, just east of County Road 450 West. Site preparation work recently started there. (LEAP stands for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace.)
The company said that once fully operational, the campus will employ about 300 people. At the peak of construction, more than 4,000 construction workers will be on-site. Meta expects the first data center buildings will be online by the end of 2027.
Last summer, members of the Lebanon City Council approved a development plan for Meta’s campus, which will consist of 13 buildings – 10 data center buildings, one network building, one logistics warehouse building and one administrative building. The combined square footage of the 13 buildings is about 4 million. The campus will eventually have one gigawatt of total data center capacity.
Gov. Mike Braun said at Wednesday’s ceremonial groundbreaking that data centers like Meta’s will help the United States remain competitive in the world of artificial intelligence.
“Data centers are going to be important,” Braun said. “They’re going to lift wages in the state, and that’s a goal of ours, too, to make sure that as we grow business, we’re growing wages.”
Meta Vice President of Data Centers Rachel Peterson also said Wednesday that the Lebanon project will be one of the company’s largest-ever investments. The Lebanon campus will be Meta’s 31st data center and 27th in the United States. Meta is also building a 700,000-square-foot data center in Jeffersonville.
“This investment places Lebanon at the heart of Meta’s AI ambitions and marks an important milestone for this community,” Peterson said. “As AI transforms how we work, connect and create, Lebanon will be part of the foundation that makes it all possible.”
Local infrastructure changes
According to the development plan approved by the city, the project will require realignments to current roadways in the area. The Indiana Department of Transportation plans to reroute S.R. 32 south of the project site. On Monday, members of the Lebanon City Council voted unanimously to give final approval to the infrastructure agreement between the city and Meta. Meta plans to invest $45 million in public road improvements around the data center campus.
In total, Meta plans to spend $120 million for water infrastructure, roads, transmission lines and utility upgrades.
Braun said that while Indiana welcomes massive projects such as Meta’s data center, they “can’t come at the expense of Hoosiers’ quality of life or their electric bills.”
The company said Meta will pay the full costs for energy used by the data center. It will also donate $1 million per year, over the next 20 years, to the Boone County REMC Community fund to provide direct energy cost assistance to families in need.
Meta also has backed 400 megawatts of new energy projects in Indiana as part of its goal to match energy use with 100% clean and renewable energy. The data center buildings are expected to achieve LEED Gold certification once operational, according to the company.
Water impacts
Residents in Lebanon and near Eagle Creek Reservoir in Indianapolis have expressed concern about the amount of water that will be needed at the LEAP District, where Eli Lilly and Co. is also building a campus, and how wastewater will be cleaned and discharged.
Braun argued that “the narrative out there” about water usage and the impact on the state’s water supply has been “misconstrued.” He pointed to the various water sources in the state, such as the Great Lakes aquifer in the northern Indiana, surface water sources in central Indiana and water sources along the Ohio River in southern Indiana.
“It will use not near as much water as what everyone said it would because it’s going to recycle it,” he said.
Construction is set to begin early this year on a project to send millions of gallons of water each day to Lebanon to meet the demands of LEAP District. As work advances in the coming years, the Citizens-Lebanon Water Supply Program is expected to provide 2 million gallons of water per day to Lebanon Utilities by 2027, 10 million gallons per day by 2028 and 25 million gallons per day by 2031, when the water supply project is expected to be complete.
Meta said the company will pay the full cost of water and wastewater service needed to support the Lebanon data center campus. It will also invest more than $75 million in public water infrastructure projects. The company will work with San Francisco-based Arable to provide irrigation solutions to independent farmers in the Upper Wabash River Basin, which covers about 1,400 square miles in northeastern Indiana and western Ohio, and it set a goal to restore more water than it consumes in the local watershed by 2030.
“We are fully committed to playing a positive role in investing in the region’s long-term success,” Peterson said. “This means designing and building this data center with efficiency and sustainability in mind.”
LEAP District developments so far
Meta first filed plans with the city of Lebanon in 2024 to build its data center campus. Members of the Lebanon City Council approved an incentives package in November 2024 for Meta’s project that included a 10-year, 50% real property tax abatement and a 35-year complete abatement of the personal property taxes Meta would otherwise owe.
Lebanon Mayor Matt Gentry said at Wednesday’s event that Meta’s data center will be “a quiet neighbor that contributes more than it consumes” and that it will position the city as a hub in the information marketplace.
“I know there will be those who ask, ‘What does the data center really do for us?’” Gentry said. “From a national perspective, data centers are the digital bedrock of our country. They are the high-tech cornerstones of our national security and essential infrastructure for the AI era. Everything we do from how we secure our borders to how we diagnose diseases, our economy now depends on physical infrastructure and facilities like this.”
Meta and Lilly are the only companies to make public commitments to the 9,000-acre LEAP District since the state launched the economic development campus in mid-2022.
Lilly has signed multiple development agreements that together total $13.5 billion and are expected to span 800 acres across two separate sites in the district. The projects include manufacturing facilities and a first-of-its-kind medicine foundry that could yield more than 1,300 high-wage jobs by 2030. Construction is ongoing on Lilly’s projects east of I-65 on the northern portion of LEAP.