Region spent decades chasing warehouses. Why are we rejecting data centers?
Drive south along Interstate 65 and Northwest Indiana’s last economic strategy reveals itself across the landscape. Warehouses spread across former farmland in enormous rectangles, loading docks stacked with trailers, and robots and forklifts quietly hum about, feeding the logistics networks that connect Chicago to the rest of the country.
There is nothing wrong with warehouses. For years, the Region competed fiercely to attract them. I remember the meetings with economic development teams and local foundations praying to land the next intermodal yard, the next cold storage facility, the next Amazon logistics hub. Anything that could bring a little more tax revenue to communities where industrial jobs had been disappearing for decades.
The math was simple. Roads still needed paving. Schools still needed teachers. Water systems and local infrastructure still needed maintenance.
Across much of rural Northwest Indiana, outmigration and consolidation were hollowing out the tax base that made those things possible. Under those conditions, warehouses made sense. Even if those massive buildings only brought a few dozen permanent jobs, they delivered something just as important. Stability. A steady tax base. Long term investment that helped communities keep their footing.
And so, we built.
Drive I-65 today and you can count them by the mile. By some estimates the Region has added tens of millions of square feet of logistics space over the past two decades. Trucks move through it every hour of the day, carrying goods across the Midwest. The strategy worked.
But warehouses ultimately move other people’s products through a region. They are infrastructure for the logistics economy, not the foundation of the next one.
Now a different kind of infrastructure is beginning to knock on the door. Data centers.
They are often described as empty buildings filled with computers, which makes them sound strangely trivial. In reality they are industrial facilities for producing immense computing power. They are electricity-to-information factories behind modern finance, medical research, logistics networks, emergency services, and the digital systems that now run much of the global economy.
And like every major industry before them, data centers rarely exist in isolation. When they cluster, ecosystems form around them. Engineering firms. Cooling technology manufacturers. Fiber infrastructure providers. Electrical contractors. Equipment suppliers. Software companies. The building itself may employ dozens of people, but the economic activity around it can support hundreds or even thousands of people across a region.
The scale of the investment alone should make people pay attention. Modern data centers routinely cost between $500 million and $2 billion to build. Some hyperscale campuses now exceed $5 billion. Once they arrive, they rarely leave.
For communities across Northwest Indiana, especially those outside the largest population centers, that kind of investment is transformative. Warehouses have helped stabilize rural tax bases over the past two decades, but data centers offer something more durable. They anchor infrastructure, attract high value industries, and connect local economies to the digital systems increasingly driving global commerce.
Northwest Indiana is unusually well positioned to compete for this industry. We sit beside one of the largest economic engines in the world, connected by dense transmission networks, fiber backbones, rail, ports and highways that were originally built to power the industrial economy of the 20th century. Those same advantages now make the Region one of the most logical places in the country to build the infrastructure of the digital one.
But the real advantage of Northwest Indiana has never just been geography or infrastructure.
It is the people who built the place.
This is a region that knows how to build things. Steel mills once rose from dunes and farmland along the lakeshore and turned Northwest Indiana into one of the great industrial forges of the American economy. Those mills consumed staggering amounts of electricity. At their peak they helped produce more than a quarter of America’s steel.
And so, we built.
We built the power plants. We built the rail lines. We built the ports and highways that made the industrial Midwest possible. When demand rose, Northwest Indiana did not ration resources or argue endlessly about scarcity. We expanded the capacity required to meet it.
The materials may change, but the instinct that built this place does not. The material of the next economy is not steel. It is data. Modern data centers attract the industries that power artificial intelligence, advanced research, financial systems, logistics platforms and the digital infrastructure behind almost every modern business. In that sense, they are simply the next generation of industrial facility, the factories of the information age.
The concerns people raise about them are not imaginary. Data centers require electricity. They require water. They require infrastructure. But so did every industry that ever transformed Northwest Indiana. Steel mills demanded enormous power. Refineries required pipelines. Manufacturing required railroads and highways. Each generation faced the same choice between fear and expansion. And each time the Region chose to build.
The hesitation appearing today comes from a different instinct. A protective one. Communities naturally want to defend what they have. But when that instinct hardens into reflexive opposition to new industry, it begins to suffocate the prosperity it was meant to protect.
The real question facing Northwest Indiana is not whether data centers will exist. They will. The question is whether we meet that opportunity the way this Region always has.
And so, we must build. Build the power. Build the fiber. Build the infrastructure that allows the next generation of industry to take root here.
Because if you drive the highways through the Region 20 years from now, you will once again see the physical record of the choices we made rising from the landscape.
The only question is what will be standing there.
I know what I’m hoping for.
I hope we build.
