What to know for tonight's public hearing on Fort Wayne's Google data center

Hey Locals,

In recent months, Fort Wayne’s Google data center has requested to expand its number of diesel generators onsite by more than five times the amount originally requested (34), bringing the new total to 179.

Tonight, from 6-9 p.m., there will be a public hearing on the topic, hosted by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management at Ivy Tech Northeast Community College Coliseum Campus in the Auditorium (Enter Door #6) at 3800 N. Anthony Blvd. 

Today’s rundown is intended to provide you with a broad overview of some key issues related to the public hearing, as well as questions and resources to consider going forward. 

To be clear: Data centers and how they affect the local economy and environment is a huge topic, and there’s a lot more to unpack here in coming weeks. But to prevent both you and us from getting overwhelmed, we wanted to start with the most basic and relevant information. 

To inform this report, we talked with:

• John Urbahns, President & CEO of Allen County’s chamber of commerce, Greater Fort Wayne Inc.
• Bruce Kingsbury, Wildlife biologist and professor at Purdue University Fort Wayne
• Friends who work closely with AI nationally (off the record)
• Tony Fleming, a retired professional hydrogeologist from Allen County, now based in Noble County
• Julie Good, Director & Conservationist at Allen Co. Soil and Water Conservation District

Let’s start with the basics.

• To wrap your mind around the implications of Fort Wayne’s Google data center, it might help to think of data centers like resource-intensive manufacturing facilities of the digital age. They create significant economic opportunities, though in different ways than more traditional manufacturing companies (like Steel Dynamics). Yet, they also require significant amounts of local resources and some tradeoffs environmentally. 
• Overall, the biggest outlier for data centers compared to other industries is their gargantuan (and unprecedented) power demand. Unlike manufacturing facilities, whose power usage fluctuates throughout the day, a data center’s power usage is extremely high, but also extremely predictable – flatlined at about 100%, 24/7. This puts significant strain on the power grid that is already struggling to keep up with explosive data center growth because…