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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIndiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s office announced Tuesday that Microsoft plans to spend $1 billion to build a new data center in La Porte.
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The company aims to use the facility to accelerate its Microsoft Cloud infrastructure to support growth in technology and artificial intelligence, the governor’s office said in a news release.
The Indiana Economic Development Corp. is offering a 35-year data center sales tax credit based on Microsoft’s $1 billion investment. For each additional $1 billion of investment made at the site in the first 15 years, the company will be eligible for tax exemptions for an additional five to 10 years, up to a total of 45 years.
“Indiana is committed to being a central hub in the global economy of the future, and this latest announcement ensures Hoosier communities and talent will be key to widespread advancements in cloud and artificial intelligence technology,” Holcomb said in the release. “We’re excited to welcome Microsoft’s new data center to Indiana and look forward to the incredible value-add impact this will have on our statewide data-driven ecosystem, new career opportunities, specifically the greater northwest Indiana community.”
Microsoft plans to hire for a variety of positions at the data center, including critical environment engineers, IT technicians and managers, inventory and asset technicians and managers, security personnel and site managers.
A specific timeline for construction is not yet known. The governor’s office said that will depend on the design, planning and permitting process, which will begin later this year.
The city of La Porte and utility company NIPSCO have approved additional incentives to support the project. La Porte Mayor Tom Dermody called it a once-in-a-lifetime project.
“What makes this even better is that we get to work with the talented and community-minded team at Microsoft,” Dermody said in the release. “From the very beginning of this project, they have been committed and attentive to the needs of our community. We are incredibly excited to welcome them here and look forward to a strong collaboration long into the future.”
The new facility will join the more than 300 data centers that Microsoft operates worldwide.
Microsoft’s investment marks the fourth official data center project to be announced in 2024, joining Google, Amazon Web Services, and Meta, which are planning data centers in Fort Wayne, New Carlisle and Jeffersonville, respectively.
But the La Porte facility isn’t the only data center in the works for Microsoft. The company recently acquired nearly 930 acres of land in Granger in north-central Indiana that was rezoned for industrial use last month for a then-unnamed company to build a data center.
Documents filed with the St. Joseph County recorder’s office confirmed Microsoft purchased the land from St. Joe Farm.
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5 years or so from now, when NIPSCO is charging northern Indiana consumers and other businesses the highest rates in the Midwest, people will wonder about the wisdom of bringing in these oversized consumers of electricity.