Data Dump: Ohio city being sued by multibillion dollar company after backing out of data center
Just a little bit of a drive west on 70 from Columbus, you’ll find a small, charming town, alive with antique stores, record shops, and quaint boutiques. And right outside of the city’s historic Downtown, you’ll find thousands of acres of green space and towering trees — perfect for an AI data center, some said about a year ago.
In April of 2025, Urbana City Council changed its own zoning rules to make data centers a permitted use on some land in Urbana, Ohio. Thor Equities invested $19.6 million of their own funds into the project because they saw “a real opportunity to create jobs, generate tax revenue, and help strengthen Urbana for the long term,” the multibillion dollar NYC-based firm said in a press release.
But not everyone in the small town was thrilled about it. As this huge project moved forward, residents raised questions and concerns about data centers and their impact on the community. And a year later, Urbana changed their mind about allowing Thor Equities to rezone 522 acres of their land for a data center. The city’s new data center moratorium means the land owned by Thor was rezoned to be “unsuitable for data centers.”
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Now, the firm is suing Urbana and their City Council in the U.S. District Court.
“This isn’t about conflict,” said Melissa Gliatta, Global COO of Thor Equities in a press release. “It’s about ensuring that communities and businesses alike can rely on the decisions made through the public process.”
She expressed that Urbana gave unanimous approval to allow data centers there, and they spent millions to commit to one. Then, all of a sudden, “Council has now voted to remove the language that was fully supported just a year ago,” she said.
Gliatta still remains hopeful. She said that this data center would bring $3 million per year to the City’s budget and $2.8 million in new tax dollars to their local schools.
“Lawsuits are never our first choice, but sometimes they are necessary to protect good-faith investments and the community benefits they create.” She also mentioned that modern data centers are “clean, low-impact facilities that use advanced technology to minimize noise, traffic, and environmental effects…” However, many studies say otherwise.
So, what do you think? Can a city change its mind when it comes to something as enormous as a data center?
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