A new data center has been confirmed for Adams County, Ohio, at the former Dayton Power & Light landfill site.

According to a regulatory filing from AES Ohio, the operator of the proposed facility has requested a new electricity load of 100MW in 2028, increasing to 1.3GW by 2032.

The site would incrementally increase its load each year from 2028, requesting 400MW in 2029, 700MW in 2030, and 1.1GW in 2031.

This filing proves local suspicions that a data center would be constructed at the site, following unconfirmed reports in February.

Since the filing, the US Army Corps of Engineers has issued a permit to enable construction of the project. The permit includes conditions to protect local endangered species and a buffer zone to prevent disturbance to local cemeteries.

There is already considerable local opposition to the proposed data center, with concerns around the lack of transparency, rising energy costs, and pollution.

Local petitions have called for a constitutional amendment to ban data centers statewide and to establish rural zoning rules in Adams County to make data centers harder to build.

Local news station WCPO-TV reported that the requested load could reach 11.4 million megawatt hours annually by 2032, 31 times Adams County’s 2025 consumption of 366,401 megawatt hours, fuelling concerns about excessive energy consumption in the county.

However, using the same formula as WCPO, based on research from FindEnergy and the MOST Policy Initiative, the data center would eclipse Adams County’s annual energy use with just the initial 2028 load request, reaching 876,000 megawatt hours that year.