Google has acquired 85 acres near Columbus, Ohio, for its fourth data center campus in the region, continuing a wave of planned projects in what has become one of the fastest-growing Big Tech data center hotbeds.
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The tech giant paid $63M for the site, located in the Columbus suburb of New Albany that has emerged as the epicenter of the industry’s rapid expansion in central Ohio. No specific plans for the site have been unveiled or filed with local officials.
"While we do not have a confirmed timeline for development for the site, we want to ensure we have the option to further grow, should our business demand it," a Google spokesperson told Columbus Business First, which first reported the deal.
According to Columbus Business First, Google acquired the New Albany property from the data center subsidiary of DBT Development Group, a D.C.-based developer that purchased the parcel for $1.6M in early 2023. The massive markup on the property in less than three years is indicative of the skyrocketing demand for land with power for hyperscale data centers in the greater Columbus area.
In just over two years, hyperscalers have acquired roughly 1,900 acres across the Columbus region, according to JLL. Most of that demand has been concentrated in Licking County, which includes a section of New Albany. In addition to Google, Meta, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft all operate or plan to build data centers in the city.
Google has been one of the primary participants in the region’s data center gold rush, announcing plans last year to spend $2.3B expanding its Ohio data center footprint in the area on top of $4.4B it had already invested.
The company’s newly acquired site sits 4 miles north of its existing New Albany campus, a 219-acre property built in 2019 that was Google’s first in Ohio. The firm has since developed two additional data centers in Columbus and Lancaster.
While the market has grown steadily over two years, there has been a sudden surge in development activity in the past month.
Last week, Ohio regulators approved the construction of a 200-megawatt gas power plant to serve Meta’s New Albany data center, a campus that sits between Google’s recently acquired site and its existing campus in the city.
Earlier in June, Vantage Data Centers announced $2.25B in financing to fully fund the construction of a 70-acre campus in New Albany. Also this month, Cologix and Lambda announced the deployment of a major artificial intelligence cluster in Columbus, and utility AEP Ohio gained approval to provide on-site power to large-scale data campuses planned by Cologix and AWS in Licking County.
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