A speculative colocation data center in New Albany, Ohio, has been granted tax incentives. The New Albany Business Park already holds large data center providers including Compass Data Centers, while Ohio itself recently attracted Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The facility will take six months to build, and construction could start right away, according to Scott Pitcher, president of the developer Green Harbor group, reported in Ohio news site This Week. The site will hold up to six tenants.

Speculation 

“We’re approaching this on a speculative basis,” said Pitcher. The site could be used for disaster-recovery services or live services. Compass Data Centers has recently completed a data center in the Business Park for American Electric Power (AEP), and has plans for more; in 2015 Compass bought a further 9.5 acres in New Albany. 

The Green Harbor data center, projected to cost $25 million, was granted a 65 percent property tax abatement for seven years by New Albany Council. The $25m investment includes $9m for land and construction, and $16 million for machinery and equipment. The data center is expected to employ eight people, with a total annual payroll of $250,000.

The seven-year tax break is valued at $193,000; in return, each year, the project is expected to generate $258,000, according to This Week, made up of $54,000 for the city’s general fund, $46,000 to the New Albany Community Authority, $121,500 for the New Albany-Plain Local School District; and $36,400 for the Souder tax-increment-financing district.

The Council expects the increased value of the land to benefit the school district, and predicts that further data centers and supporting facilities will add more jobs, citing the city’s experience with AEP, which first built a mission-critical data center, and then followed this up with a transmission headquarters employing 630 people.

AWS has just opened an Ohio region, supported by three data centers, including one in Dublin Ohio, just 20 miles away from New Albany.