St. Joseph County officials have touted a new development coming to New Carlisle as on par with the $3.6 billion GM battery plant that’s preparing to start construction.
Specifics on the new project are few with county officials not publicly releasing the name of the company involved or what precisely they intend to build. But new public documents presented to the St. Joseph County Council on Tuesday shine more light on the Razor5 project and it's potentially record-breaking scope.
According to new documents that are part of a proposed tax abatement, the Razor5 development would dwarf the GM plant and comes with a projected $11 billion in investment. That number would likely mark the largest single development project in Indiana’s history.
The company — which is rumored to be Amazon Web Services but is operating behind the Razor5 name — would build a series of buildings on two separate parcels. One parcel is 640 acres directly east of the Navistar Proving Grounds bounded by Strawberry Road. Another smaller 280 acre parcel north between Edison Road and Larrison Drive.
The documents also say the company estimates it will create 400 full-time jobs at around $30 an hour.
However, none of the project is finalized. Razor5 has not purchased any of the land, though it has been rezoned to industrial, and the tax abatements still need several layers of approval in the coming months. Last year Razor5 paid the owners of the 640-acre parcel $1 million just to be able to survey the area.
In the past year, multiple giant tech companies have announced plans to construct data centers in the Midwest. Just this year, Google has been attached to a nearly $1 billion data center in Fort Wayne and Meta, formerly Facebook, is moving forward on a project of similar scale in Jeffersonville, which is in southern Indiana near Louisville.
