Aligned to Expand in Ohio With $200M Data Center Campus

Aligned Data Centers has entered Ohio with the acquisition of a 129-acre land parcel in Sandusky, Ohio, for the development of a new data center campus. Public records show that a joint venture of Avgeris & Associates and Franklin Partners sold the property for $52 million. The vacant site was formerly occupied by General Motors, where it manufactured automotive equipment.

CEO Andrew Schaap said, in prepared remarks, that Aligned has experience with redeveloping brownfield projects that have lain dormant for years in communities, indirectly helping preserve greenfield sites for other uses.

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Aligned intends to invest at least $202 million in the upcoming redevelopment, a company spokesperson told Commercial Property Executive. The site is at 2509 Hayes Ave. has 1.3 million square feet available for development and is equipped with power feeds capable of delivering up to 80 megawatts—expandable to more than 200 megawatts.

Plans call for four separate buildings, which can be adapted for cloud, AI, hyperscale or enterprise deployments. Power densities will range between 3 kW to more than 300 kW per rack.

The first of the four data centers, dubbed NEO-01, will feature Aligned’s patented waterless heat rejection technology, along with potentially other hybrid cooling solutions, depending on customer demands.

Ohio’s growing data center footprint

“As adoption of AI and ML compute continues to grow, along with capacity constraints—driven largely by land and power availability across North America—markets such as Northeast Ohio have become attractive due to readily available power, tax incentives and appreciation of the economic, environmental, and social opportunities that data centers bring to these regions,” the Aligned spokesperson told CPE.

Ohio provides tax incentives for data center companies that are willing to invest in the region. Investments of $100 million or more over a three-year period, along with total annual payrolls greater than $1.5 million, are eligible for total or partial exemption of up to 100 percent of sales taxes.

The state has a growing data center footprint, with operators including Cologix, H5, Flexential, Cyxtera, along several others.

In June, Amazon announced plans to invest $7.8 billion in Ohio, for the construction of more AWS data centers. The project is estimated to generate 230 direct jobs, along with 1,000 secondary ones. Amazon’s announcement was the second-largest private investment in Ohio’s history, following Intel’s $20 billion commitment in Licking County.

Aligned’s expansion in Ohio will bring the company’s total to eight states in which it operates data centers, along with Illinois, Texas, Oregon, Arizona, Maryland, Utah and Virginia.