Pat Tiberi is president and CEO of the Ohio Business Roundtable. Matt Szollosi is executive director of ACT Ohio, the Affiliated Construction Trades Ohio Foundation.
One of us runs one of Ohio's largest business coalitions. The other represents 14 different regional building and construction trades councils throughout Ohio.
We don't often sit down and write the same thing together.
But look closely at what's actually happening in the Ohio communities that already have a data center, and it's hard to miss the pattern: These projects have quietly become one of the best deals a small or mid-sized Ohio community can land.
Most Ohioans haven't heard that story yet. A statewide survey found most people still aren't sure what to make of a data center coming
to their county.
That's understandable.
So much of what gets attention is the data center built somewhere else, years ago, with none of today's technology or protections. The real story is closer to home, and it's a good one: new tax revenue, new careers and new life for land that had been sitting empty for years in communities across Ohio right now.
Start with power.
Data centers aren't driving up your electric bill
Ohio's newest data centers are largely funding and building their own electricity supply.
Under a tariff the Public Utilities Commission approved, these facilities pay for the overwhelming majority of their contracted electricity capacity for 12 years, whether they use it or not. Ohio's Power Siting Board has already approved more than 2 gigawatts of generation that data centers are building and paying for themselves, adding to the grid rather than straining it.
Every major data center operator in the country has now signed a federal pledge to bring, buy or build the power they need. The upshot for an Ohio homeowner: A new data center down the road isn't the reason the electric bill goes up.
Then there's the tax base. In the New Albany area, Johnstown-Monroe schools took in $2.5 million last year from data center land alone. That is 9.2% of the district's entire operating budget, all while the buildings themselves were still under an abatement.
Once those abatements expire in Licking County, individual data center projects are on track to generate between $5 million and $17 million a year apiece for their host school districts. Statewide, data centers paid more than $1.1 billion in Ohio state and local taxes last year alone. That figure is enough, by the state's own spending figures, to cover the full cost of running every airport and every public library in Ohio, combined.
Data centers are putting Ohioans to work
A major focus of ours is the benefits to Ohio’s workforce.
A single large data center supports 1,500 to 2,000 skilled tradespeople during construction, at wages that average $58 an hour and run as high as $90 with overtime. In Licking County, the growth has been remarkable:
The Newark Electrical apprenticeship program has gone from 95 apprentices to more than 900 in just four years, now partnered with 28 area high schools to give students a direct line from the classroom into a lucrative trade — training that's happening in a new facility rising out of a shuttered Sears store, turning empty retail space into opportunity.
Statewide, Ohio’s building trades unions and contractors are investing $80 million a year into training the electricians, ironworkers, pipefitters, laborers and other skilled craftsmen and women to meet this demand.
The technology keeps getting better, too.
The newest data centers use closed-loop cooling systems that draw a fraction of the water older designs did, and communities like Marysville have worked hand in hand with developers on things like landscaped buffers and sound barriers that make these campuses good neighbors.
None of that is theoretical; it's already up and running.
In places like New Albany and Union County, the residents living next to these projects can tell you plainly what's changed: new revenue for their schools, new job opportunities for their kids and neighbors, and a use for land that used to sit vacant.
There's a bigger national story here too, about keeping the physical infrastructure behind American AI and computing power on our side of the competition with China.
That matters.
But it's not the reason we're writing this. We're writing it because the actual record, in schools, in paychecks and in reused land, tells a more encouraging story about data centers than most Ohioans have heard, and because, for once, the state's largest business coalition and its building trades unions are glad to be the ones telling it together.
Pat Tiberi is president and CEO of the Ohio Business Roundtable. Matt Szollosi is executive director of ACT Ohio, the Affiliated Construction Trades Ohio Foundation.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Data centers are an absolute win for Ohio communities. Critics are wrong | Opinion
