NEW ALBANY, Ohio (WCMH) — Microsoft bought a substantial swath of land along the western border of Licking County last week for $56.98 million, according to county auditor’s records — and a county commissioner told NBC4 another data center could be coming.
MBJ Holdings, which is a direct affiliate of the New Albany Co., sold the tech giant close to 184 acres. The land, located at 3287 Beech Rd., is directly south and west of nearly 400 acres bought by Amazon Data Services in January for $116 million.
Licking County Commission President Tim Bubb said the theory is Microsoft will build a data center, although he added that the tech giant “(hasn’t) said much” about plans for the future of the property.
“We’ll believe it when we see it,” Bubb said. “They could do anything with it, but they own the land.”
Microsoft declined to comment on its plans for the recent purchase. In an email, a spokesperson wrote the corporation doesn’t “have anything definitive to share at this time” but added it is committed to its cloud-based software.
Data centers abounding in central Ohio
Microsoft is just the latest of the country’s Big Tech firms to lay claim on land in and around New Albany.
That neighboring land owned by Amazon will likely become a data center. Ohio Environmental Protection Agency wetland permit applications submitted by MBJ Holdings in November detailed proposals for sizable data centers with more than two dozen buildings on the same plots Amazon purchased in January.
At the time, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment, and the e-commerce and IT service management firm still has not announced anything official.
“These sites don’t grow on trees,” Bubb said. “It’s a clustering effect, if you think about it. Once you have one data center, and it works out real well for Facebook, then the next thing, Google comes, and then Amazon comes, and then Amazon doubles the size of their data centers. And now you have Microsoft.”
Amazon already has seven data centers in central Ohio, three of which are in New Albany, according to data center tracking resource Baxtel. Not far away is Facebook parent Meta’s.
Google announced in May it would add two — on land it already owned in Columbus and Lancaster — after building out its original data center in New Albany. Construction had already begun, according to Google.
State officials, in remarks made at the Ohio Chamber of Commerce the day of the announcement, touted the jobs additional data centers would bring to central Ohio. But Google would not say how many hires it would make once its facilities went live.
With the litany of tech announcements in the region, Bubb said he sees a difference between manufacturing projects, such as Intel’s plant, and data center projects.
“Data centers are processing. They are big buildings with computers — they don’t employ a lot of people,” Bubb said.
