Incentives approved for $11 billion Amazon data center project
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Officials in St. Joseph County have given final approval of incentives for Amazon Web Services’ planned $11 billion data center campus in New Carlisle.
The project was first announced in April, with the company planning to create at least 1,000 jobs at the campus, which is being developed at the Indiana Enterprise Center.
Bill Schalliol, executive director of economic development for St. Joseph County, said the incentive package will provide a net savings of about $1.9 billion for the company.
The St. Joseph County Redevelopment Commission, St. Joseph County Commissioners, and St. Joseph County Council all approved the incentives at their respective meetings on Tuesday.
The incentives include a 10-year, 50% real property tax abatement for three parcels of land totaling 870 acres. The company plans to build 16 data center “shells,” each of which will be about 200,000 square feet.
The AWS data centers at New Carlisle will contain computer servers, data storage drives, networking equipment, and other forms of technology infrastructure used to power cloud computing capabilities and generative artificial intelligence technologies, the state said when the project was announced.
Eight support buildings are also planned for the campus, though those buildings were not included in the tax abatement request.
Schalliol said Amazon plans to add 400 direct jobs at the campus, with hundreds more being added by third-party contractors.
Also among the approvals was an Enterprise Information Technology Exemption, which provides an 85% tax exemption on all personal property related to the data center itself. Schalliol said the company will still pay more than $722 million in taxes over a 35-year period.
The council also approved an economic development agreement for the project, which included a “community enhancement agreement” designed to provide benefits to the local area.
“The community enhancement agreement does a lot of different things for a lot of different groups,” Schalliol told our partners at WSBT-TV. “It’ll help parks, It’ll help schools and students. It’ll help fire departments in the area, it will allow money for road improvements. It will allow for utility improvements to be made. The entire agreement has about $143 million value at the end of the day.”
All of the items voted on by the council were approved by a vote of 7-2, with council President Mark Root and Councilor Amy Drake voting no.
During the meeting, Drake questioned whether the incentive package was needed for the project.
“Personally, I think [the project] would happen most likely anyway. In fact, it already is,” she said. “Consider that Amazon already pulled eight building permits at $1.5 million each, and structures are already being erected. Consider that Amazon already got a very lucrative financial incentive package from the state to incentivize them to choose Indiana. I think all of us are very well intentioned in our votes tonight. We all want economic growth, but we also all want the very best deal for our county and for our taxpayers.”
The local incentives come in addition to the nearly $150 million in incentives being offered by the Indiana Economic Development Corp. Those incentives are performance-based, meaning the company can only claim them once it has made promised investments.
The project also qualifies for Indiana’s data center sales tax exemption, which means AWS won’t have to pay the state’s sales tax on the purchase of the computers, servers and software in the data center or on the electricity used in running that equipment.
A few residents expressed concerns over the impact the project would on the area’s water supply. Schalliol noted that there is plenty of water to go around for both the Amazon project, as well as the General Motors/Samsung SDI electric vehicle battery plant being built nearby.
Schalliol said the county has set a limit of 24 million gallons of water per day being used within the Indiana Enterprise Center, and both projects are not expected to generate usage of more than 21 million gallons per day.
A representative for Indiana Michigan Power was also on hand to reiterate that local electric ratepayers will not be on the hook for any additional power usage caused by the data center project.
“We currently have the capacity to serve all our existing customers, industrial customers, residential customers, and we are treating this separately,” said I&M Community Affairs Manager Mona Livingston. “We will definitely be making significant enhancements to the transmission lines to accommodate additional loads, and also working with Amazon to purchase more power.”
WSBT reported the first four buildings are to set for completion by the end of this year with more being added over the next 10-15 years.