Aligned has broken ground on the first data center at a new campus in Ohio.

“We're excited to share that we officially broke ground on our NEO-01 data center in Perkins Township!,” the company posted on LinkedIn this week. “A huge thank you to all the community members and officials from Perkins Township who came out to celebrate with us, as well as our incredible partners who made this possible.”

The company announced it had acquired a 129-acre land parcel in Perkins Township, Erie County, in September 2023. Perkins Township is part of Sandusky South, on Lake Eerie, and located west of Cleveland.

At full build-out, the campus will host four buildings. Aligned’s website says the NEO-01 data center will total 96MW across 200,000 sq ft (18,580 sqm).

The facility 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.

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 is potentially expandable to more than 200MW.

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

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

The site was later operated by GM-subsidiary 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.