Microsoft has bought another 43 acres of land in Pataskala, Ohio, just outside of Columbus.
First reported by Columbus Business First, the parcel of land is adjacent to the 580-acre parcel on Refugee Road purchased by the tech giant last year.
The new parcel of land is located at Etna Parkway and Refugee Road and was bought for $11.44 million last month, according to the Licking County Auditor’s website.
In a statement to the publication, a Microsoft spokesperson said: “Microsoft has nearly 50 years of supporting local business growth, community development, and innovation. We continue to expand our data center footprint globally to meet the growing demand for cloud services. We don’t have additional information to share at this time about the purchase of land in Pataskala, Ohio, but we are committed to working with the community as we move forward.”
The company has not formally confirmed whether the land will be used for a data center.
Microsoft is already working on several sites in the region, including a five-building data center campus outside Columbus, Ohio, and a campus in Hebron, some five miles south of Heath.
The cloud company also acquired 200 acres of land in New Albany, also for a potential data center development in June last year.
Columbus, Ohio, is becoming a major data center market, with the likes of Amazon, CyrusOne, Edged, Google, Meta, QTS, Aligned, and others building or operating data centers in the area. A DC Byte report recently identified New Albany - a suburb of Columbus - as the "data center capital of the midwest."
