Aligned Data Centers is building a new campus in northern Ohio.

The company has revealed a new brownfield land acquisition in Perkins Township.

The company has acquired the 129-acre land parcel in Erie County, which will be the site of a new four-building hyperscale data center campus.

“Aligned is very excited to enter the Northeast Ohio market and return a brownfield site to productive use for the local community,” said Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned. “As part of our sustainability mission, Aligned has not shied away from redeveloping brownfield projects that have lain dormant for many years (sometimes decades) in communities. Transforming these properties into assets for the local community is a win-win-win – removing blight, generating revenue, returning jobs to a former industrial location, and preserving greenfields for other uses.”

Perkins Township is part of Sandusky South, on Lake Eerie and located west of Cleveland.

Aligned’s NEO-01 data center, the first of four planned facilities, will offer densities beyond 300 kW per rack via air-cooled, liquid-cooled, or hybrid cooling solutions – all within the same data hall – including Aligned’s Delta waterless heat rejection technology.

Aligned didn’t share details of data center size or capacity, nor timelines for development.

The acquired property is a former automotive equipment manufacturing facility originally built by New Departure (later merged with General Motors) around 1947.

The Sandusky Register reports Aligned acquired the site at 2509 Hayes Avenue, for $52 million in August 2023.

A 2020 sales brochure from Franklin Partners and Avgeris and Associates suggests the site potentially offers up to 80MW, but is expandable to more than 200MW.

At its peak in the 1970s and 80s, the site – which featured a single-story building spanning more than one million sq ft and two on-site substations – employed around 5,000 people.

The site was later operated by GM-subsidiarity Delphi Automotive, where it employed more than 1,000 people, until the unit declared bankruptcy in 2008. Kyklos, Inc, took over operating and operated the plant under the name KBI until around 2017. Demolition work has been going on the site over the course of 2023.