Two Amazon data centers under construction in Jerome Township, Ohio, have made 84 calls to firefighters since the projects were approved in 2021.

As reported by The Columbus Dispatch, the data centers have made two calls per month to the emergency services over the past four years, often necessitating "lights and sirens."

The data centers in question are located in Ohio's Union County - one along Industrial Parkway in Marysville and the other on Warren Road.

Details about the projects are limited beyond reports that rezoning was approved in 2021. Satellite imagery from Google Maps shows five large data centers along Warner Road near the Industrial Parkway intersection.

Some of the emergency calls have even been related to incidents that caused fatalities. The Warren Road site saw an employee crushed to death during construction, and another fell to his death at the Industrial Parkway site, as per previous reports from The Dispatch.

The Industrial Parkway also suffered a fire in April 2025 that occupied firefighters for 30 hours and caused $50 million in damage. A separate fire at an AWS data center in Indiana also occurred in April.

According to The Dispatch, not only are calls to the emergency services frequent, they are often held up from assisting by security guards and told to wait for up to an hour outside the facilities.

At the time, an Amazon spokesperson told The Dispatch that Amazon and its contractors "have implemented additional mechanisms to further improve health and safety of their sites," and suggested that delays were due to differing policies implemented by its contractors regarding background checks for people entering the site.

Beyond emergency calls, the data center projects also necessitate regular safety inspections from the emergency services.

“We’re not a huge fan of the data centers, but Hilliard controls economic development, and data centers bring in business,” the township’s fire chief, David Baird, told The Dispatch.

With a growing influx of data centers coming to the state, this is diverting firefighters from other emergencies.

Notably, many of these projects have tax abatements for several years, meaning they are not yet contributing to the additional costs associated with more frequent visits. Jerome Township has now enacted a nine-month moratorium on new data center projects.

While the projects under scrutiny have long been in development, Amazon was given the green light for additional data centers around ten miles away and also along Industrial Parkway earlier this year.

That campus will be located on 55 acres of land in Marysville Innovation Park at 14684 Industrial Parkway. AWS plans to build two data centers spanning a total of 500,000 sq ft (46,450 sqm).

The company has a significant presence across Ohio, previously stating it has spent more than $10 billion on digital infrastructure in the state in the last decade.

In 2023, AWS said that it planned to invest an estimated $7.8bn by the end of 2029/2030 in data centers in Ohio. Around $3.5bn of that is expected to go to New Albany, where it announced plans to build a five-building data center campus.

The company is also planning developments in other parts of Ohio. In November last year, Amazon announced plans to build a $2bn data center campus in Sunbury, Central Ohio. The company purchased land for the project at the end of December.

Another campus in Fayette County, Southern Ohio, is also planned by AWS. News of the data centers first surfaced in November last year, with the company acquiring 590 acres in Jefferson Township last month. Local filings suggest the campus could go live in 2026.

Elsewhere, Amazon has been praised for helping local communities understand the needs of data centers. Speaking to DCD, Bryan Rothamel, director of Virginia's Culpeper County Economic Development (CCED) said that Amazon had helped support the county in preparing for its data center developments.

DCD understands that Amazon has developed programs with local law enforcement in Culpeper County on how to treat its facilities; what happens around them, providing familiarity with points of entry, potential vulnerable areas, and how best to respond to a potential emergency. The idea is to ensure first responders on site are not delayed in any event, and the company has conducted training with the likes of local fire departments and county fire marshals to this end.