The new data center in Springfield has been meeting new construction milestones, with the first phase of construction expected to be completed within the next few months.
While the company and economic development leaders see a big opportunity for job growth for the Clark County city, the new project has also been met with some resistance. This includes concerns about energy use, diesel generators and more.
The Canada-based AI infrastructure company 5C Group is constructing the $1.3 billion data center facility at Prime Ohio Corporate Park. The company is retrofitting the former LexisNexis data center to make a new, larger data center, scaling up from 67,000 square feet to 214,000 square feet.
According to the company, the 75-megawatt project will create 120 jobs.
Company executives came to Springfield this week to meet with city officials, state legislators and economic development partners to share updates on its development.
'This is a 40, 50 year project and beyond'
The facility will be built in a phased approach — 25 of its anticipated 75 megawatt capacity is expected to be fully operational by the end of September.
They hope to make Springfield a home. The employee office that’s being renovated there will be the company’s biggest in North America, 5C Group CEO Jonathan Ahdoot said.
“This is not a facility that's here for a few years,” Ahdoot said. “This is a 40, 50 year project and beyond. Our contracts are all very long. The assets we're investing in are long-term assets and we want to be good neighbors and good community leaders.”
After inheriting the project from an acquisition last year, 5C Group saw its first Ohio-based project as an opportunity.
“We saw this as being a hub, mainly because the quality of the workforce here, the skill of the work force here is very good,” Ahdoot said.
Ohio has the fifth-highest concentration of the data centers in the country, according to the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.
Other confirmed tenants in the building include cloud infrastructure company Vultr and AI infrastructure company Crusoe Energy Systems.
5C’s environmental commitments
5C Group officials told WYSO in December a number of the measures the company will be taking to reduce the environmental and residential impacts the facility will have in the community.
Hyperscale data centers have dominated in the headlines in the past couple of years, as locals adjacent to these projects have reported negative effects such as strain on water resources, soaring electricity bills and persistent humming sounds.
5C Group’s plans have largely stayed the same, including their plans to construct a water reservoir on site to reduce the need to pull from the city’s water system.
“It's always this sustainable-first approach. And that's what enables us to design data centers that are very efficient and I could tell you there's two benefits to that,” Ahdoot said.
“It's obviously good for the environment, but also we fit more capacity in the same envelope. So if we get a certain amount of power, if we're more efficient in how we run our site we can fit more chips in that same envelope.”
Chips are what’s used to process, store and transmit high volumes of data – a crucial component to data center operations.
In terms of potential strain on electric bills, Ahdoot echoed what the company told WYSO in December: “There's no burden on the residents with what we're doing.”
“The burden’s on us, and that's what the deal is, and that's the same approach we're using across all the regions we're developing in," Ahdoot said.
Energy use
While the company insists the electricity bills won’t rise because of the project, the regional grid operator serving Ohio, PJM Interconnection, associates a majority of the rising energy demand to data centers, and is even pitching a plan to have states and utilities require data centers to secure their own power sources or risk being cut off from power in grid emergencies.
Ahdoot said the company is exploring generating some of its own energy on-site. That's something they’ve done at a few of their other data centers.
While not etched in stone, to generate energy Ahdoot said they’d use “the greenest strategies we can find that make sense on the capacity side.”
Ohio Edison provides energy to the city of Springfield. First Energy, the parent company of Ohio Edison, wants data centers to pay for transmission upgrades instead of passing the costs onto customers.
As far as the signature data center humming sound, Ahdoot said the company undergoes extensive sound studies to mitigate noise and have positioned their equipment and gear to ensure the sound is kept to a minimum. Ahdoot said it should be about 45 decibels, measured from the property line. That's around the level of a conversation or a modern refrigerator.
Residents follow the research
A number of residents aren’t happy about the new neighbor. Many have taken their concerns and questions to Springfield city commission meetings.
That includes Springfield residents Nicole Bethel and Melissa Rexroth. The two of them are working together to collect signatures to place an issue on the November ballot to amend Springfield’s city charter to prohibit hyperscale data centers in the city.
They’re also collecting signatures on behalf of the campaign Conserve Ohio to place a similar, statewide ban on next year’s ballot.
Local resistance enabled the city commission to approve a temporary six month moratorium on new hyperscale data centers last month.
For Rexroth, she cites her pre-existing conditions as one of the reasons for her concern for data centers’ human health impacts.
“My hope is that Springfield takes a proactive approach as far as monitoring air, land, water, things of that nature, because it affects all of those, the pollutants that they emit can affect all of things,” Rexroth said.
For the past year, she’s spent time researching what the health harms can be and brought her questions to the city commission. Up to this point, she said she’s been disappointed in the level of transparency from both the city and company on the project.
“I am going there publicly so other people can hear as well what the answers are. I feel like why should I have a meeting, a private meeting, get information and then nobody else knows?” Rexroth said.
Bethel, a nurse, said she lives three miles from the data center. She said she scoured medical journals to find the best information on what the potential risks are, such as a study from UC Riverside that found air emissions associated with data center developments tripled the number of health impacts in California across a four year span. Emissions can come from the power plants supplying the electricity to these facilities, and the on-site backup generators that may emit fine particulate matter.
“These generators are huge and they use a lot of diesel or methane gas, depending on which kind they are,” Bethel said.
“And it's the emissions that they put off. So, they're finding that these hyperscale data centers, it's like a trade off, they might use less water, but they produce a lot more heat and they're producing what they call heat islands.”
According to Springfield’s data center FAQ, the company plans to have 19 diesel-powered generators on-site.
Research on the health impacts of these projects are new with more emerging, as the data center boom sharply increases.
Local economic development officials want to bridge the gap
At the suggestion of Springfield area leaders, the company hopes to hold town halls with residents.
“...To educate them on what we're actually doing, because one thing that came out of the meeting is that they didn't know a lot of what we described in the tour in terms of what we're doing to reduce water, reduce power, and how we're helping the community,” Ahdoot said.
Kassie Scott, Springfield’s economic development manager, also took part in that meeting. She said she tries to be a conduit of information between the company and the community.
Earlier this year, the city of Springfield published an FAQ page for the 5C data center.
“So we are making a very serious effort to take these concerns and to address them and to say when we don't have answers, if that is the case. Because I always want the information to be factual and I don't want people to feel like their concerns are dismissed,” Scott said.
The incoming tech businesses are coming at a time when Springfield’s labor market has been in flux, after the announcement that International Motors operations in Springfield will halt and layoff notices for its employees have been issued.
According to filings to the Ohio Department of Development, in addition to the 120 permanent, full-time jobs at 5C, Vultr and Crusoe’s parent company The Constant Company are each expected to create 20 full-time positions for a total of 40.
A priority for the city and 5C is to try to have locals take up the new jobs.
“So while one company might close and some opportunities can go away, that's natural. That's how the labor market works. We would expect that to happen,” Scott said.
“What you're also seeing is new opportunities coming that are changing the mix of employment opportunities that are available in Springfield and that's from my seat. That's what I want to see because I want us to have a diverse portfolio of options.”
