About 20% of all the data centers in the U.S. are located in eight states around the Great Lakes.
As of 2024, the region had 525 data centers — with another 224 planned by 2030, according to data compiled by the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
Ohio has more than 100 operational data centers. The state is slated to get another 77 by 2030. That will propel Columbus past New York City to become the second-largest data center hub in the region, after Chicago.
The new data centers are also expected to more than double the industry's share of the state's energy consumption in the next four years, from 5.3% to 10.9%.
João Ferreira, acting director of the University of Virginia's Center for Economic and Policy Studies, said new hyperscale data centers use on average 30% more electricity than older, smaller data centers.
"These are large-sale facilities — the size of probably five, six, seven Walmarts," Ferreria said.
Ferreria said hyperscale data centers, like existing Amazon, Meta and Google facilities in Ohio, run 24/7, training computer-learning models.
Ferreria said while the facilities consume a lot of energy, Ohio should be able to keep up with demand by purchasing energy from other states. That will likely cause further increases in energy costs for Ohioans.
Ferreria said data centers do have economic benefits. They create jobs, though most of those jobs are during the construction phase.
"After they become operational, (data centers) are not very labor intensive. So, it means that they can have one worker for an area the size of one Walmart," Ferreria said.
He said the Cooper Center report accounted for that. It noted that as of 2024, data centers in Ohio created around 22,300 short-term jobs, but only about 4,500 permanent jobs.
"So we kind of underestimate, compared with other studies that have been done before, the number of jobs that are created by data centers," Ferreria said.
Ferreria said data centers' real economic impact comes in the form of property tax revenue that goes to state and local governments.
"The issue is that many times, because localities want to attract these data centers, they end up creating tax exemptions for these data centers, so they are kind of losing the whole economic benefit," Ferreria said.
The report attributed $128 million in local tax revenue and another $123 million in state tax revenue to Ohio's data center operations.
Ferreria said that data centers are here to stay. They're the backbone of artificial intelligence and the "big tech" industry.
"But we probably need better policies," Ferreria said. Otherwise, he said, small businesses and low-income residents will be the ones to bear the cost of data centers.
The report from the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center and the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation focused on the economic, fiscal and energy-related impacts of data centers in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
