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Indiana is in a global race for tech and innovation, and from where we sit, it’s in a great position: home to one of only nine Salesforce Towers, one of only six Infosys U.S. tech and innovation centers, and one of the 15 highest-growth VC ecosystems. And now, Indiana is one of the world’s prime data center hosts—one of 33 for Google, 100-plus for AWS, 300-plus for Microsoft, and 24 for Meta.
The growth of Indiana’s tech sector hasn’t traditionally been driven by big capital-expenditure investments. It’s grown largely from the minds of great Indiana digital innovation leaders who have harnessed human capital in the digital age.
This year, it’s different.
In 2024’s first five months, the Indiana Economic Development Corp. has announced five major tech capital investments, totaling nearly $19 billion in projects that will have large footprints across the state:
◗ Microsoft’s $1 billion data center in La Porte.
◗ Google’s $2 billion data center in Fort Wayne.
◗ Amazon Web Services’ $11 billion data center in New Carlisle.
◗ SK Hynix’s $3.9 billion semiconductor packaging facility in West Lafayette.
◗ Meta’s $800 million data center in Jeffersonville.
Rising demand for cloud computing and storage infrastructure is a key factor in this growth. That increase was in part driven by decades of digital-presence growth, which accelerated through the pandemic as well as the super catalyst of artificial intelligence, which requires large amounts of data to be stored and intelligently processed.
Indiana has been playing to win these major projects by promoting our compelling combination of technical, economic, environmental and regulatory considerations—on top of strong state leadership. On the supply side, we have ready access to high-quality tech talent, including engineering; affordable quality-of-place consideration; lower cost of construction and maintenance; availability of energy sources; existing internet network connectivity; and a strong regulatory environment for taxes, business regulations, incentives and data protection.
On the demand side, infrastructure projects tend to favor proximity to customers. Salesforce’s acquisition of ExactTarget in 2013 was very much a product and customer play. Its major presence here speaks to the customer expansion potential in our region. Similarly, Infosys’ technology and innovation centers in part enable its U.S. business to take a more localized and customer-centric approach, even with COVID-related headwinds in commercial real estate.
Many companies in our region are well positioned to thrive in the AI age. McKinsey data published in the second quarter shows that organizations’ use of generative AI has nearly doubled, to 65%, up from 33% just a year ago. It is one of the fastest technology adoption curves in human history. AI adoption overall has spiked from a steady state of 50%-60% to 72%.
The opportunity is clear. Tech-driven productivity growth has to be an economic strategy—for the tech sector and also for Indiana’s advanced and adjacent industries that represent 65% of the state’s total economic activities. Global, national and Indiana-specific reports agree that organizations adopting tech in general, and AI specifically, are outperforming their competitors.
To keep our residents, our companies and our communities competitive, we must invest in putting AI to work.
The recent Big 5 tech investments will have market-changing spillover effects for generations to come. They signal the growing maturity of Indiana’s tech and innovation ecosystem and its mix of strong infrastructure tech and enterprise tech as well as tech-driven corporate community, midsize innovation-driven firms and startups. This growing density and how the sectors interact with one another will continue to drive economic vibrancy.
TechPoint will continue to catalyze that interaction, and we invite every Indiana innovator to join us in this journey whether you are searching for talent, customers or capital.•
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Gootee is CEO and president of TechPoint.
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Four of the five projects cited in this article are data centers. All indications are these will involve minimal jobs, but consume massive amounts of energy. Here’s hoping the “wins” don’t end up costing Hoosiers big time with exponentially increased utility bills.