A New York-based developer’s proposed USD 1.5bn hyperscale campus in Madison County is moving forward in its due diligence phase with city approval.

The Village of West Jefferson Council of Ohio last month approved a pre-annexation agreement with Sentinel Data Centers to annex 78.83 acres just outside the Village of West Jefferson in Deer Creek Township, Madison County for the creation of another Central Ohio data center campus.

Central Ohio is becoming a data center hot spot. East of Sentinel’s proposed West Jefferson campus, a 14-acre, 24 MW Edgeddata center and a 40-acre, 60 MW Stack Infrastructure campus are both located in New Albany, as well as completed and ongoing projects of tech giants Amazon Web Services (AWS), QTS, Googleand Meta.

Sentinel’s proposed campus, introduced during a Madison County Port Authority Board of Directors meeting earlier this year, will include three two-story data center buildings, each 186,438 square feet, with associated equipment yards.

Traffic and load studies are underway with the Ohio Department of Transportation and Ohio Edison, respectively.

West Jefferson filings show the developer is designing the facility with air-cooled infrastructure, avoiding large-scale water demands.

The development is expected to generate approximately 250 jobs, including engineering, operations and customer support roles.

Sentinel plans to request a 15-year property tax abatement, a 15-year equipment sales tax exemption and a Port Authority sales tax exemption. A Tax Increment Financing agreement is being evaluated for utility and road improvements.

The campus could take up to 15 years for the complete full buildout due to the market demand and electricity availability, Nathan Painter, Sentinel’s legal counsel, said during the Village of West Jefferson Council meeting.

Sentinel has delivered and owned build-to-suit facilities for confidential hyperscale tenants in the US, according to the company, including a 10 MW, 130,000-square-foot data center in Rockland County, New York and a 300-acre Data Center Valley in Ashburn, Virginia, which is master planned for more than 300 MW (and has, so far, delivered 100 MW of hyperscale capacity).