Data consumption has been skyrocketing for AI chatbots, digitalized medical records, online banking and cat videos.
Now Newport Beach, California-based Province Group plans to invest up to $500 million into the 1-million-square-foot Merrillville Technology Park data center campus near Colorado Street and Harms Road in Merrillville that will pay workers up to a projected $175,000 a year.
Chicago-based Wylie Capital plans to develop a 1.2 million square foot data center at Broadway, 93rd Avenue and Georgia Street in Merrillville that could result in $600 million in investment and up to 200 mostly six-figure jobs. And Karis Critical eyes up to $900 million in investment in a data center on 180 acres on 101st Avenue east of Deep River County Park that would bring hundreds of jobs.
"It's a huge boon to the tax base of course once these buildings are totally finished and operational," Town Council President Rick Bella said. "They have to be equipped inside, which is another tax base increase. The neighboring businesses that will come here because there are data centers of this size here is tremendous. We're building Liberty Estates now, a thousand housing units. We need people that are going to buy those houses and move in."
It would pay high salaries to highly educated professionals like network engineers, computer programmers, computer support specialists and database administrators.
"Those are the kind of people who are going to build new homes and bring their families to Merrillville," he said. "The trickle effect of these types of large businesses. You can't really put a dollar figure on it. It just keeps growing and growing."
Data centers should help modernize Northwest Indiana's economy with high-paying, high-tech jobs, Bella said.
"I think it helps put the Region on the map if we have data centers and more modern businesses," he said. "The steel industry and the oil industry are there and they helped build Lake and Porter counties. They've been there for decades but they're limited. These types of businesses help build a labor force, a smart labor force. These are different types of jobs with large salaries. It's going to build the economy of the Region."
Stephen Muenstermann, the president of Cloudbusters and a Data Center Advisory Board member, said some academic studies would suggest that the $2 billion in direct investment in data centers in Merrillville could end up having an $8 billion economic impact in the town.
"What happens is, if you look at things like autonomous vehicles and people doing surgical processes, they can't have any latency in the amount of time when they make the action they're doing remotely on the screen. They have to have precision timing," he said. "In order to do that, you have to have as few hops as possible to get to the source. So the more data centers you have in close proximity, the less jumps you have. If you design your network right and make sure you get a secure path with minimum microsecond wait time behind it, you can draw those types of businesses."
Data centers could draw health care, financial, legal, cybersecurity and other firms.
"They want to be close to data because they need it fast," Bella said. "There's a multitude of different businesses that will be here because of data centers."
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