Licking County

Licking County sits on the eastern edge of the Columbus metropolitan area, a belt of corn and soybean farms that runs from the I-270 outer loop through the villages of New Albany, Johnstown, Granville, and Alexandria. The county’s 2020 population was roughly 178,000. The farmland east of State Route 62 has produced row crops on the same parcels for five and six generations. The Alum Creek aquifer underlies most of the county’s western third; Hoover Reservoir, the City of Columbus’s largest surface-water source, straddles the Licking and Delaware county line.

In January 2022 Intel announced a 1,000-acre fabrication complex on the New Albany side of the Licking County line, and a chain of shell-LLC land purchases followed within eighteen months. Meta’s Sidecat LLC assembled 1,345 acres for a 1,000-megawatt data-center campus with an on-site 200-megawatt natural-gas plant. Amazon Web Services acquired multiple parcels for a planned 3,500-megawatt, five-building complex. QTS, on behalf of Blackstone, assembled roughly 700 acres for a 222-megawatt campus. Google took multi-site positions. Cologix added 154 acres in Johnstown proper with an announced 800 megawatts. Vantage announced a 192-megawatt expansion in the adjoining Franklin County corner of New Albany. The combined assemblage exceeded 4,000 acres and 5,500 announced megawatts, figures that would rank the county among the largest concentrated data-center load pockets on earth if the buildings reach their announced capacity.

The community the hyperscalers bought into is rural, working-class, and overwhelmingly white. Johnstown village, by the 2020 census, was 5,182 residents and 97.1 percent white. The village’s median household income in 2023 was roughly $112,000, though the older village core and the farm households east of State Route 62 skew working-class and depend on household wells and a small-system water supply. The surrounding unincorporated townships (St. Albans, Jersey, Monroe, Liberty) carry the farm economy through which the hyperscalers are now buying. The atlas records the Licking County case as a rural working-class white community confronting concentrated corporate and state power, a pattern that appears again in New Carlisle, Indiana, in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and in the exurban counties the data-center industry has targeted since 2023.

Two institutional features distinguish the Licking County case from the other Midwestern hyperscaler clusters. The first is the Granville Superfund plume, a federally tracked contamination of the bedrock aquifer under Granville village that the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have monitored since the 1990s. Covert test-well drilling by the hyperscalers’ water consultants, documented by the Reporting Project at Denison University in 2024, overlaps the plume’s modeled migration path and threatens to mobilize contamination into the groundwater upon which Granville, Alexandria, and New Albany draw. The second feature is the July 2025 order from the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio requiring AEP Ohio to adopt a data-center-specific tariff. The order compels hyperscalers with loads above 25 megawatts to subscribe to firm capacity and to cover at least 85 percent of that subscribed load for twelve years, the first state-commission order of its kind in the country.

The organizing infrastructure that produced the PUCO order and that is now pressing the water fight has four anchors. Ohio Citizen Action, founded in Columbus in 1975, runs a statewide petition drive for a statutory ban on supersized data centers. The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, the statutory residential ratepayer advocate at the PUCO, filed the testimony on which the commission built the July 2025 tariff order. The Reporting Project at Denison University produces the factual record of the water and land assemblages on which the other actors build their cases. The St. Albans Township trustees, a three-member elected body in a township of roughly 4,500 residents, voted in April 2026 to remove “data processing services” from the township zoning code, effectively banning data centers in the township’s jurisdiction. The township’s vote was the first successful zoning-level defense in the county.

The atlas reads the Licking County case against the historical record of neighborhood-scale political defense. The closest parallel in the atlas is Malone, the small Black community in Lincoln, Nebraska, that confronted a university-led land grab in the 1970s and organized a community center that still functions eighty years after it opened. The Malone precedent is not about demographic match; Malone was Black and urban, and Johnstown is white and exurban. The precedent is about political method. A small community, facing a land-use proposal backed by concentrated capital and by state government, built a durable institution whose archive survived the clearance pressure and whose neighbors still use it. The Licking County coalition is building the same kind of institution, in a different form, against the same kind of pressure.

The Johnstown cluster essay in this atlas records what the hyperscalers took, what Alum Creek and the Superfund plume face, what AEP Ohio ratepayers paid and stopped paying, who fought back, what the atlas’s historical cases offer, and what present organizers should borrow. The record is unfinished. The Meta campus is under construction. The AWS complex is in phased delivery through 2030. The Intel fab has slipped from 2025 to 2027 and faces further delay. The water and ratepayer fights are open. The Licking County chapter of the atlas tracks a live case whose outcome the organizers in Johnstown, Granville, New Albany, and Alexandria are still contesting.