The document lists the purpose of the company’s move as “renovating the existing facility, and constructing a 147,000 square-foot expansion of the facility to attract hyperscale customers, bringing 200 megawatts to the facility in partnership with FirstEnergy.”
For comparison, the square footage of that expansion is roughly between the size of a basic Walmart store and a Walmart Supercenter.
But there’s some question about the scope of the project, as the company listed an enormous range of possible costs.
The school board document references a separate application that 5C Data Centers is said to have filed with the city of Springfield, saying they planned to invest somewhere between $16.1 million and $1.32 billion at the project site.
The News-Sun requested that document from the city Monday, but had not received it as of 11 a.m. Tuesday.
A data center is the physical facility that stores digital data and contains computing machines and related equipment, including the computing infrastructure that information systems require such as servers, data storage drives and network equipment, according to the website of Amazon Web Services.
Amazon recently announced plans to build a $2 billion, 450,000-square-foot data center campus in Sunbury, outside Columbus. Microsoft, Meta and Google have also built data centers in Ohio.
5C Data Centers is a Canadian company that recently acquired a data center in Columbus and planned to expand it into a larger campus.
At the time, Nick Etscheid, chief corporate development officer of 5CDC, said the Columbus facility would be “the first of many mega-campuses we plan to announce.” Steve Perez, founder and president of 5CDC the facilities would serve “hyperscale and large cloud customers.”
The Springfield site that 5C Data Centers plans to acquire is currently a LexisNexis Springfield site, according to the Data Center Map group. They describe it as “a hosting site for law firm data and systems … with a 62,000-square-foot data center, 20,000-square-feet of raised flooring, and an 18,000-square-foot mechanical/electrical plant” with generators, 350-ton chillers and state-of-the-art security measures.
That LexisNexis site is west of the Dole plant on Benjamin Drive, and is surrounded by a significant amount of undeveloped land.
The Clark-Shawnee school board document says 5C Data Centers USA was seeking, with city support, a 15-year, 100% tax exemption for the project pursuant to an Enterprise Zone Agreement, as the site is within an existing Enterprise Zone.
