Microsoft's plans to expand its data center infrastructure into Indiana will benefit the city of La Porte first. The company plans to invest $1 billion in a new 245,000-square-foot data center on 489 acres in the Radius Industrial Park.
Gov. Eric Holcomb announced the deal that will create up to 200 new jobs by the end of 2032.
The company plans to hire environment engineers, IT technicians and managers, inventory and asset technicians and managers, security personnel, and site managers.
“We’re excited to welcome Microsoft’s new data center to Indiana and look forward to the incredible value add impact this will have on our statewide data driven ecosystem, new career opportunities, specifically the greater Northwest Indiana community,” Holcomb said in a June 4 press release.
Construction of the project will begin after the design, planning and permitting process is complete. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft and the city of La Porte plan to start that process later this year.
“We appreciate the collaboration with the state, city and the La Porte Economic Advancement Partnership that has made this opportunity possible,” said Bowen Wallace, Microsoft CVP Datacenters, Americas Region. “We look forward to an enduring and beneficial relationship with Indiana and the city of La Porte as we build and scale our data center infrastructure to support our customer and partners.”
Both state and local leaders helped broker the deal that includes various performance-based incentives that brought the deal to La Porte.
The Indiana Economic Development Corp. in particular offered a 35-year term sales tax credit in return for the $1 billion capital investment. Further $1 billion investments at the site in the first 15 years will result in additional length to the term, up to 45 years. The incentives are performance based and eligible to claim after the investments are complete.
“Projects like this happen once in a lifetime, and their effects are felt forever,” La Porte Mayor Tom Dermody said. “What makes this even better is that we get to work with the talented and community-minded team at Microsoft. From the very beginning of this project, they have been committed and attentive to the needs of our community.”
NIPSCO also offered incentives.
“Providing safe, reliable and affordable energy to the communities we serve is NIPSCO’s mission, and we have been working closely with Microsoft on plans to fulfill the energy needs for the new data center in the city of La Porte,” said Vince Parisi, NIPSCO president and chief operating fficer. “This economic development project will deliver long term, sustained benefits to the Northwest Indiana region, and we’re proud to support these efforts.”
The campus will help power the Microsoft Cloud as part of the company's worldwide network of computing infrastructure, which includes 300 data centers and 280,000 km of network.
Microsoft officials said they are committed to mitigating the environmental impact of the project on the local community. The company's four goals are: carbon negative by 2050, replenishing more water than it uses, zero waste and protecting more land than it uses by 2025.
The center is one of four planned in Indiana by Fortune 500 companies recently, for a total $14.8 billion investment.
(Photo by JeanLuc Ichard – stock.adobe.com)
