Proposed 680-acre data center in Central Ohio denied by local authorities after concerned residents push back

In November, it was revealed that an EdgeConneX data center was making its way to a Central Ohio community. And this community was not thrilled about it.

The data center, made up of 18 major structures, is to be constructed on 200 acres at SR-752, about 17 miles south of Columbus. At the Asheville Village Council meeting in November, residents learned that EdgeConneX (a global data center business) had been given a 30-year property tax abatement, but the amount of water and power that the data center would be consuming was not shared with the public, among other details they asked for.

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A packed City Council meeting in January (along with plenty of yard signs that read “No Data Center”) showed that residents strongly oppose this new data center. At this meeting, EdgeConneX highlighted that this could be beneficial to the community—that they could even offer an artificial intelligence course at the high school to prepare students for jobs at the facility. They cited studies related to noise, air, and water quality/usage to tell the community that they didn’t expect the data center to impact Asheville negatively.

And the residents weren’t buying it. They lined up at the podium, publicly speaking their minds about their opposition to this data center, worried their small town would turn into an industrial, polluted one. At this time, the first phase of the project (the 200-acres) was already properly zoned, meaning city council’s ability to stop or change things was limited. The city leaders did vote to pause any new data center projects for 180 days, however.

At last week’s city council meeting, on Feb. 2, a request from EdgeConneX to annex even more land for the start of the construction of the data center was denied by local authorities. They requested 490 more acres for a huge, 680-acre data center campus, but now they may have to rethink the entire data center, as they initially planned to build multiple data center buildings in the additional 490-acre parcel.

Central Ohio residents aren’t only posting signs in their yards and showing up to City Council meetings, but they’ve taken to Facebook to show their opposition to Ohio’s growing amount of data centers, too.

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