Johnstown and the New Albany Hyperscaler Cluster

What the ground held

Map: Licking County before the hyperscaler assemblage

Licking County sits on the eastern edge of the Columbus metropolitan area, a belt of farmland and small villages that runs from the I-270 outer loop through New Albany, Johnstown, Granville, and Alexandria. The farmland east of State Route 62 has produced corn and soybeans 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. The bedrock under Granville holds a Superfund plume that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tracked since the 1990s, a legacy of mid-century industrial solvents whose migration path the EPA and the Ohio EPA have modeled in detail.¹

Johnstown village, at the county’s northwest corner, had a population of 5,182 in the 2020 census and was 97.1 percent white. The village’s median household income in 2023 was roughly $112,000, a figure that averages the older village core against the newer subdivisions on the county’s western edge.² The farm households east of State Route 62 and along Johnstown Alexandria Road skew working-class and depend on household wells and a small-system village water supply that the village designed for several thousand households, not for gigawatt-scale industrial demand. The surrounding unincorporated townships (St. Albans, Jersey, Monroe, Liberty) carry the farm economy through which the hyperscalers are now buying. The community the atlas records here is rural, working-class, and overwhelmingly white, a demographic that appears again in New Carlisle, Indiana, and in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and that defines the receiving communities for most of the Midwest data-center build-out.

Granville village, eight miles south of Johnstown, is the home of Denison University and of the Superfund plume. The plume sits under the village’s bedrock aquifer and has been the subject of federal remediation since a 1990s enforcement action against the former industrial tenants on South Main Street. The plume is stable under current pumping conditions. Aggressive groundwater withdrawal nearby changes the hydraulic gradient and can mobilize the contamination into drinking-water sources the Reporting Project and the EPA both track.¹ The geography of the Granville aquifer is the reason the hyperscalers’ water search became a countywide controversy rather than a single village fight.

What the shell LLCs took

Map: The 4,000-acre hyperscaler assemblage

The assemblage began with Intel. In January 2022 the company announced a fabrication complex on roughly 1,000 acres in the New Albany International Business Park, just across the county line into Licking. The site was not a conventional data center but a semiconductor fab, an altogether different kind of facility with its own water, power, and air-permit profile. The New Albany City Council in 2022 approved a thirty-year, 100 percent property-tax abatement for the Intel site, converted from the standard fifteen-year ceiling by a 2021 Ohio “mega-project” statute that the General Assembly passed specifically to clear the way for Intel.³ The abatement transfers an estimated two billion dollars in foregone property taxes away from the New Albany-Plain Local School District and the Licking County general fund over its life.

Meta’s purchase came next. Acting through a shell limited liability company called Sidecat LLC, Meta assembled 1,345 acres along U.S. Route 62 in New Albany and the adjoining townships between 2023 and 2025, paying approximately $504,000 per acre in the aggregate for a total near 679 million dollars.⁴ The Hunterbrook Media investigation of Meta’s data-center assemblages in 2024 documented the Sidecat entity’s role and the company’s use of a standard shell-LLC template that Hunterbrook had tracked across seven states.⁵ Meta announced a 1,000-megawatt campus with an on-site 200-megawatt natural-gas power plant, a configuration that allows the campus to bypass the full AEP Ohio interconnection queue for its first operational phase.

QTS, operating on behalf of Blackstone, assembled roughly 700 acres through shell LLCs with Razor-style naming conventions that matched the patterns Hunterbrook had documented in Prince William County, Virginia, and in other QTS markets.⁶ The announced capacity was 222 megawatts. Cologix added 154 acres on the Johnstown village edge with an announced 800 megawatts phased through the late 2020s.⁷ Amazon Web Services took multi-site positions through the Vadata LLC and New Albany Tech LLC shells, announcing 3,500 megawatts across five buildings on a 2024 to 2030 delivery schedule.⁸ Google operates existing facilities in the corridor and has taken undisclosed additional positions. Vantage announced a 192-megawatt expansion in the Franklin County corner of New Albany.⁹ The combined assemblage exceeded 4,000 acres and 5,500 announced megawatts, figures that would place the county among the largest concentrated hyperscaler load pockets on earth if the buildings reach their announced capacity.

The land-market effect of the shell LLCs was immediate. Per-acre prices along State Route 62 and the nearby township roads rose from a pre-Intel baseline of roughly $15,000 per agricultural acre to the $400,000-to-$500,000 range the hyperscalers paid.⁴ Farm families whose land bordered the assemblages faced a choice no earlier generation in the county had faced. A family could sell into the assemblage at the hyperscaler price and leave the land that had supported the family for four or five generations, or the family could hold and watch the surrounding parcels go. The shell-LLC structure prevented negotiated community-scale terms; each family received a separate offer, often under a non-disclosure provision that forbade conversation with neighbors. The assemblage proceeded parcel by parcel.

What Alum Creek and the Superfund plume face

Map: Hoover Reservoir and the Alum Creek aquifer

The Intel fab alone draws approximately 1.5 million gallons per day from Hoover Reservoir under an allocation agreement the City of Columbus signed with the State of Ohio in 2023.¹ The draw is not incremental. Hoover Reservoir serves roughly 1.1 million residential and commercial customers across the Columbus Division of Water’s service area, and the reservoir’s safe yield is a function of annual rainfall, watershed runoff, and the competing demands the City of Columbus, the City of Delaware, and several smaller systems already place upon it. The Intel allocation moved Hoover toward the edge of its safe yield under a wet-year scenario and past that edge under a moderate-drought scenario.

The hyperscalers’ water demand exceeded what Hoover could supply on any reasonable reading. The data-center campuses, unlike the fab, do not publish their water-draw figures in public filings; the announced capacities imply cooling loads in the range of several million gallons per day across the full cluster. The water search moved in two directions. The first was additional surface-water allocation from Alum Creek Lake and from the Scioto River, a process the Ohio Department of Natural Resources administers through its water-withdrawal permitting system. The second, and the controversy the Reporting Project documented in 2024, was covert groundwater drilling.¹

The Reporting Project’s investigation showed that the hyperscalers’ water consultants were drilling test wells under non-disclosure agreements in locations that extended north from the New Albany fab site toward Granville village. The drilling sites overlapped the modeled migration path of the Granville Superfund plume. Ohio EPA had not been informed of the drilling program when the Reporting Project’s first story ran in the autumn of 2024. The Columbus Free Press, the longest-running alternative weekly in central Ohio, carried follow-up reporting that named specific consultants, well sites, and the landowners who had leased their property for exploratory drilling.¹⁰ The coverage prompted formal inquiries from the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, from Ohio EPA, and from the Licking County Board of Commissioners.

The hydrogeology is not in dispute among the scientists who have worked it. The Alum Creek aquifer and the Granville bedrock aquifer share recharge and discharge boundaries along the Alum Creek and Raccoon Creek drainages. Heavy withdrawal in one location changes the hydraulic gradient at its neighbor. The Superfund plume under Granville is stable because the gradient has held constant for two decades of monitoring. A sustained multi-million-gallon-per-day draw anywhere along the northern margin of the Alum Creek aquifer risks mobilizing the plume into the drinking-water sources of Granville, Alexandria, and the rural households along the creek. The Reporting Project’s water coverage, which runs to dozens of stories between 2022 and 2026, has carried the full public documentation of the search.¹

What AEP Ohio ratepayers paid, then stopped paying

Map: AEP Ohio service territory and PJM transmission corridors

The electric side of the Licking County fight moved faster than the water side because the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio operates on statutory timelines and the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel has statutory standing. AEP Ohio, the investor-owned utility that serves Licking County, filed its data-center tariff proposal with the commission in 2024. The proposal would have recovered transmission and generation upgrade costs from AEP Ohio’s general residential and small-commercial ratepayer base while serving the hyperscaler load that required the upgrades. The Consumers’ Counsel intervened, supported by the Environmental Law and Policy Center, Ohio Partners for Affordable Energy, and the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Advocacy, and filed testimony documenting the load projections, the transmission queue, and the cost shift the utility’s proposal implied.¹¹

On July 23, 2025, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio ordered AEP Ohio to adopt a data-center-specific tariff.¹² The order requires 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, regardless of actual consumption. The order moved the cost of the transmission and generation upgrades from residential ratepayers to the hyperscalers whose demand required the upgrades. The commission’s reasoning, which the order sets out at length, rested on a factual record the Consumers’ Counsel and its allies had assembled. Power Mag’s coverage treated the order as a national precedent, the first of its kind in the country and the template for the parallel proceedings then pending in Indiana, Virginia, and Georgia.¹³

The transmission side is not resolved. PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization that runs the grid across Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and eleven other states, has queued major 765-kilovolt and 345-kilovolt corridors through central Ohio to serve the Licking County load. Renewable Energy World’s coverage of the PJM queue catalogued the specific lines AEP Ohio and American Transmission Company have filed, their routes, and the timelines for environmental review and construction.¹⁴ The PUCO order covers intra-utility cost allocation; it does not cover PJM-wide transmission costs, which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission allocates under a different framework. The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel has filed at FERC to carry the cost-allocation fight into that forum. The outcome there is not yet known.

The PUCO order is, in the narrow sense, a rate-case victory. In the broader sense it is a political fact. Before July 2025 the national data-center industry’s model of growth assumed that residential ratepayers would absorb the grid-upgrade costs the industry’s load required. After July 2025 that assumption no longer held in Ohio, and the state-commission orders that followed in other jurisdictions drew on the Ohio record. The fight the Consumers’ Counsel, Ohio Citizen Action, and the allied intervenors opened in 2024 produced a result that will shape data-center economics across the country for the rest of the decade.

Who fought back

Ohio Citizen Action has been the ground-level organizing force. Founded in 1975 on the Citizens Action template the national network built in the 1970s, the group ran a statewide petition drive for a statutory ban on supersized data centers starting in 2026.¹⁵ The petition language targets facilities above a threshold the group sets by peak megawatt demand and by groundwater draw, and proposes a statutory moratorium until the Ohio General Assembly writes siting, water, and ratepayer protections into the state code. The canvass seeded conversations in Licking County, Delaware County, and the Mahoning Valley, the three regions where hyperscaler land assemblages have moved fastest. The petition drive is, in the method Sandy Buchanan and her successors built, a membership-building operation as much as a legislative one. The door-to-door record the canvass produces is the evidence the statutory actors and the litigators use.

The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, described above, is the statutory ratepayer advocate whose filings produced the July 2025 PUCO order. The office’s role fits the Cooper Square Committee pattern the atlas records across its earlier places. Ohio Citizen Action builds the organizing record; the Consumers’ Counsel carries the record into the forums where statutory standing matters; the Reporting Project and the Columbus Free Press carry the record into the public sphere.

The Reporting Project at Denison University has been the factual backbone of the whole defense. Founded in 2018 under Jack Shuler’s direction, the project trains undergraduate reporters on accountability journalism and publishes at thereportingproject.org and through partners including the Newark Advocate and the Ohio Capital Journal. The project’s 2024 investigation into covert aquifer drilling near the Granville Superfund plume is the primary public documentation of the hyperscalers’ water search.¹ The coverage prompted the Ohio EPA inquiry, the Consumers’ Counsel filings, and the Licking County commissioners’ review.

The St. Albans Township trustees, a three-member elected body representing a township of roughly 4,500 residents, carried the zoning-level defense. In April 2026 the trustees voted to remove “data processing services” from the township’s permitted uses, effectively banning data centers in the township’s jurisdiction.¹⁶ The Ohio State University Farm Office agricultural-law program documented the vote and its legal reasoning for the farm-owner constituency across the state. The township vote is the first successful zoning-level data-center defense in the county. Jersey Township and Monroe Township trustees were debating parallel language when this essay went to press.

What the atlas’s historical cases offer

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 the Malone Community Center at 2032 U Street, a community center that still functions eighty years after its 1942 opening. The Malone precedent is not about demographic match. Malone was Black and urban. Johnstown is white and exurban. The precedent is about political method.

The Malone Community Center was the institution through which Black Lincoln answered the Northeast Radial freeway proposal and, later, the Antelope Valley Project. The Center kept the archive, housed the meetings, and served as the address through which state and federal actors had to engage the community. The Recovering Lost Stories project, a 2024-to-2027 collaboration with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries funded through a Council on Library and Information Resources grant, is now digitizing roughly six thousand documents from the Center’s archive. The archive survived because an institution held it. The institution survived because the community built and maintained it.¹⁷

The Licking County coalition has not yet built that institution. Ohio Citizen Action is a statewide group; the Consumers’ Counsel is a statutory state office; the Reporting Project is a university journalism program; the St. Albans trustees are an elected township body with a narrow mandate. None of these is the village-scale institution Malone became for Black Lincoln. The Johnstown Public Library, the Alexandria Public Library, and the Granville Public Library each hold pieces of the historical record, but no single institution has been chartered to hold the archive of the hyperscaler fight and the community response.

The lesson the Malone case offers is specific. The archive matters because the organizing cycle is long, longer than any single campaign, longer than any single generation. The Cooper Square Committee fought Robert Moses for a decade, kept the record through the 1970s and 1980s, and used the record again in the 1990s when Cooper Square Community Land Trust took title to the buildings it had saved. The Black Bottom Archives opened in 2015 to keep the record of a 1950s displacement that the I-375 removal fight brought back into public negotiation sixty years later. The Malone Community Center kept records from the 1930s forward that the 2020s Recovering Lost Stories project is now digitizing. The pattern is consistent. The community that builds the institution keeps the record. The community that keeps the record holds the evidence the next fight requires.

What present organizers should borrow

The first lesson from the atlas’s historical record is township-scale zoning as a first line of defense. St. Albans Township trustees removed “data processing services” from the township zoning code because three elected township officials could vote to do so, and the statutory framework of Ohio township government gave them the authority. Jersey, Monroe, and Liberty townships carry the same authority. The pattern the West Side of San Antonio followed in the late 1960s, when neighborhood organizations used the city’s own zoning ordinance to slow down the HemisFair clearances, is directly applicable. The township zoning code is not a complete defense; a hyperscaler can buy an adjoining township or petition for annexation into a friendly village. The code is a speed bump, and speed bumps, multiplied across contiguous jurisdictions, produce the organizing window the state and federal fights require.

The second lesson is state utility commission filings as a second line of defense. The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel’s testimony in the AEP Ohio tariff case rested on load-projection analysis, transmission-queue documentation, and cost-allocation modeling that the office produced over eighteen months of statutory intervention. The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, the Michigan Public Service Commission, the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, and the Georgia Public Service Commission all have parallel residential-ratepayer advocates or statutory procedures that can carry the same fight. The PUCO order is the national template. The organizing that produced it is replicable.

The third lesson is the archive. The Licking County coalition needs an institution in Johnstown, Granville, or Alexandria, chartered to hold the records of this fight and the records of the community response, staffed by someone whom the community trusts, and open to the researchers, journalists, and organizers who will need the record in 2030 and 2040 and beyond. The institution can be a library program, a historical society expansion, a new community center, or a chapter of an existing state or national organization. The form matters less than the fact of the charter and the durability of the staffing. The Malone Community Center, the Black Bottom Archives, and the Cooper Square Committee all began as the explicit institutional answer to a clearance pressure. The Licking County coalition has the pressure. The institution is still to be built.

The Johnstown cluster essay ends, as the atlas’s live cases must end, with an incomplete record. The Meta campus is under construction. The AWS complex is in phased delivery through 2030. The Intel fab has slipped and faces further delay. The Superfund plume has not been mobilized, but the drilling continues. The PUCO order holds, but the PJM transmission fight is open. The St. Albans zoning ban holds, but the adjoining townships have not yet followed. The statewide petition drive is collecting signatures. The organizing that will decide what Licking County looks like in 2030 is happening now, in the township halls, in the PUCO docket rooms, in the Reporting Project’s pages, and at the doors Ohio Citizen Action canvassers are knocking. The atlas records the case because the case is live. The method the atlas documents is the method the Licking County coalition is now using, and the outcome will tell whether the lessons of the twentieth-century clearances travel into the data-center decade.

Footnotes

1. Reporting Project at Denison University, “New Albany’s Search for Water for Intel Goes Far Beyond Granville,” 2024. https://www.thereportingproject.org/new-albanys-search-for-water-for-intel-goes-far-beyond-granville/. Cited for covert aquifer drilling documentation, Hoover Reservoir allocation, and Granville Superfund plume hydrogeology. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Wikipedia, “Johnstown, Ohio,” 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown,_Ohio. Cited for 2020 census population, 2023 median household income, and village demographics. ↩

3. WBNS 10TV, “New Albany votes to give Intel property tax exemption for 30 years,” 2022. https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/new-albany-votes-give-intel-property-tax-exemption-for-30-years/530-ff41a3f3-9795-43ed-8d64-6fb841075dc7. Cited for thirty-year, 100 percent property-tax abatement; the 2021 Ohio mega-project statute; and the school district and county revenue implications. ↩

4. Acres Land Values, “Meta Expands Ohio Footprint: 679 Million Invested, 1,345-Acre Data Center Campus,” 2024. https://landvalues.acres.com/meta-expands-ohio-footprint-679-million-invested-1345-acre-data-center-campus. Cited for Meta’s aggregate acreage, aggregate purchase price, and per-acre figure. ↩ ↩²

5. Hunterbrook Media, “Inside Meta’s Data-Center Empire,” 2024. https://hntrbrk.com/meta-data-centers/. Investigative documentation of Meta’s shell-LLC template, including Sidecat LLC, across seven state markets. ↩

6. NBC4 Columbus, “Microsoft confirms building data centers in Licking County topping 700 acres,” 2024. https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/licking-county/microsoft-confirms-building-data-centers-in-licking-county-topping-700-acres/. Cited for the 700-acre QTS assemblage operated on behalf of Blackstone, and the 222-megawatt announced capacity. ↩

7. Data Center Dynamics, “Cologix invests 7bn in Licking County, Ohio data center campus,” 2024. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cologix-invests-7bn-in-licking-county-ohio-data-center-campus/. Cited for the 154-acre Cologix site in Johnstown village and its 800-megawatt announced capacity. ↩

8. Data Center Frontier, “AWS Announces New Albany Data Center Campus,” 2024. https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/site-selection/article/33011941/. Cited for the 3,500-megawatt announced capacity across five buildings and the 2024-to-2030 phased delivery schedule. ↩

9. Facilities Dive, “Turner wins Ohio data center expansion for Vantage,” 2024. https://www.facilitiesdive.com/news/turner-wins-ohio-data-center-expansion-vantage/732391/. Cited for Vantage’s 192-megawatt New Albany expansion in the Franklin County corner of the corridor. ↩

10. See columbus-free-press. ↩

11. Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, docket filings in PUCO Case No. 24-0XXX-EL-AIR, 2024-2025. https://occ.ohio.gov. Testimony by the Consumers’ Counsel and allied intervenors in the AEP Ohio data-center tariff case. ↩

12. Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, “PUCO Orders AEP Ohio to Create Data Center-Specific Tariff,” July 23, 2025. https://puco.ohio.gov/news/puco-orders-aep-ohio-to-create-data-center-specific-tariff. Cited for the order requiring hyperscalers to cover 85 percent of subscribed load for twelve years and the load threshold of 25 megawatts. ↩

13. Sonal Patel, “Regulator Approves AEP Ohio’s Landmark Data Center Tariff,” Power Magazine, 2025. https://www.powermag.com/regulator-approves-aep-ohios-landmark-data-center-tariff/. National-precedent framing for the PUCO order and its implications for parallel proceedings in other states. ↩

14. Renewable Energy World, “Data centers are flocking to Ohio. Here comes the transmission to support them,” 2024. https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/power-grid/transmission/data-centers-are-flocking-to-ohio-here-comes-the-transmission-to-support-them/. Cited for the PJM 765-kilovolt and 345-kilovolt queue, the AEP Ohio and American Transmission Company filings, and the environmental review timelines. ↩

15. Thomas Claburn, “Ohio campaign aims to halt data center expansion,” The Register, March 18, 2026. https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/18/ohio_datacenter_petition/. Cited for Ohio Citizen Action’s statewide petition drive and the proposed statutory threshold for the supersized-data-center ban. ↩

16. Peggy Kirk Hall, “Data Center Controversies Continue in Ohio,” Ohio State University Farm Office, April 2026. https://farmoffice.osu.edu/blog/mon-04062026-1124am/data-center-controversies-continue-ohio. Cited for the St. Albans Township trustees’ removal of “data processing services” from the permitted uses and the legal reasoning of the vote. ↩

17. Malone Community Center, Lincoln, Nebraska, organizational history and Recovering Lost Stories digitization project. http://malonecenterhistory.com/about. Cited for the 1942 opening, the 1955 renaming, the continuous community service through the Northeast Radial and Antelope Valley fights, and the 2024-to-2027 archive digitization. ↩