Residents in Decatur Township are pushing back hard against Sabey Data Centers’ plan for a two-building facility, with zero speakers at a key meeting supporting the project.
The community is focused on unanswered basics of AI-era infrastructure: projected power draw on the AES Indiana grid, water use, noise, and pollution, all of which Sabey says it can’t fully detail yet because designs for its largest building aren’t done.
Sabey is pitching the site as a flexible multi-tenant hub that could host AI workloads for big-name clients, and is seeking a 50% property tax abatement while promising at least $10 million a year in local taxes over a decade, though residents say too little flows directly to their township.
The land is zoned industrial but not for data centers, so Sabey needs a zoning exception and must get past organized local opposition, which has already sunk a Google data center plan elsewhere in Indianapolis.
For AI infrastructure watchers, this is another clear signal that grid-heavy, tax-incentivized GPU campuses are running straight into local politics, community distrust, and basic questions about who really benefits.
The article is worth reading for its detailed view of how one community is stress-testing the social and regulatory license for AI data center expansion.
Source: Southsiders still oppose a data center in Decatur Township
