Amazon data center

Four Republican St. Joseph County Council members are asking Amazon Web Services to voluntarily pay into a fund that would give homeowners property tax relief, despite the council granting the tech giant an abatement in August 2024.

Citizens Action Coalition Program Director Ben Inskeep says the violations, while not major, indicate a troubling pattern at Amazon's data center near New Carlisle, which is still growing.

Amazon on Wednesday invited the news media into its data center for the first time to talk about job creation, as many in the public worry about how the growing number of data centers will impact energy and the environment.

Amazon and New Prairie officials say the tech giant's school STEM labs will prepare students to work in their data centers and in a wide array of fields, some of which we don't even know about yet.

The new limits on low-frequency sounds that industrial operations can emit won't apply to Amazon's data center because its building permits have been issued but they will apply to the data center that Microsoft will soon start building in Granger.

St. Joseph County Council President Bryan Tanner says he sympathizes with people living north of the Toll Road who might want to complain about low-frequency sound but it will not be possible to accurately measure sound from the data center when the Toll Road makes so much noise itself.

Of four Indiana data centers studied, only property values close to Amazon's data center near New Carlisle increased more than values countywide.

After Microsoft announced it won't seek property tax breaks for its data centers, four St. Joseph County Council members have asked Amazon to renegotiate their $4 billion property tax abatement over 35 years.

Now that Microsoft has announced a national policy of forgoing local property tax breaks for its data centers, four of the St. Joseph County Council's five Republicans have sent Amazon Web Services a letter asking it to renegotiate the 35-year, $4 billion property tax abatement it's receiving from the county for its New Carlisle data center under development.

The St. Joseph County Drainage Board on Tuesday indefinitely tabled a request from Amazon to drain 640 acres to build the foundation for their next set of data shells. Farmers worry that the Niezpodziany Ditch and its receiving river, the Kankakee, can't handle the 35 million gallons of water a day that would be discharged from the dewatering.