St. Joseph County just blocked rezoning for a $12 billion, 1,057-acre data center near New Carlisle, but the developers can refile in six months, so this location is paused, not dead.
Separately, Microsoft already owns a 900+ acre Granger site rezoned industrial in 2024, with utilities sorted but no construction expected until 2026 and no public numbers yet on capex or jobs.
The real action now is around incentives: the county still has to decide on tax abatements and whether to put the Microsoft site into a TIF district, which would lock most new tax revenue into local infrastructure and industrial build-out instead of schools and public services.
Local residents are pushing hard against generous incentives, arguing billion‑dollar AI and cloud players should fund community services directly instead of extracting long tax holidays.
For AI infrastructure, this signals that land and power siting in the Midwest remains viable, but community and fiscal pushback is getting sharper, which could delay GPU‑hungry builds or change their economics.
Operators should factor in longer entitlement timelines, tighter scrutiny of tax deals, and a need for clearer stories on energy use and local benefits when planning large AI data centers here.
The article is worth reading to understand how local politics and tax structures can make or break hyperscale AI data center timelines.
Source: What’s next for New Carlisle and Granger Microsoft data center?
