New Albany, a rural suburb northeast of Columbus, Ohio, has become a fast-growing market for data centers and could soon be home to a natural gas-fired power plant.
Facebook/New Albany, Ohio Government
Powerconnex notified state regulators of plans for a 120 MW natural gas plant in New Albany.The plant would serve as the primary source of electricity for a data center on the same site.As energy demand from AI strains the grid, developers seek ways to bypass it entirely.
A developer is planning to power a data center in Ohio by building a natural gas-fired plant on the site, a public filing showed.
Lawyers for Powerconnex Inc. notified the Ohio Power Siting Board last week of the company’s plans to build the plant, which would serve as the data center’s primary source of electricity. The power generation facility, named the New Albany Energy Center, and the data center would be built on the same 48.6-acre site in New Albany, Ohio.
Construction on the plant is expected to start as soon as the fourth quarter of 2025, according to the letter. This means the data center could be up and running by the first quarter of 2026.
It would have a generating capacity of up to 120 megawatts, which is enough electricity to power a large hyperscale data center by today’s standards. However, it’s a fraction of the electricity developers of AI megaprojects have said they’ll need. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, said the company is building a data center in Louisiana with over two gigawatts of capacity.
The data center development boom has caused electricity demand to surge in the US after nearly two decades of stagnation. Data centers are energy-intensive facilities that run 24/7, and as Big Tech continues to push into artificial intelligence, their projected future energy use is expected to create an enormous strain on the country’s electric grid. Frustrated by regulatory bottlenecks in crowded data center markets, developers are seeking alternative solutions, Jones Lang LaSalle said in a report last month.
Already, developers are facing regulatory bottlenecks in crowded data center markets, and are seeking out alternative solutions — like building on-site power plants — to waiting for access to the grid.
Business Insider reported last week that developers for an Oracle data center in Abilene, Texas — widely thought to be the first Project Stargate location — are building a 360.5-megawatt natural gas turbine plant to help power it. This sort of arrangement is known as “behind-the-meter” in the utilities industry — it means that the electric generating facility is not connected to the grid, and local utilities can’t monitor or measure its use.
Christine Pirik, a Dickinson Wright attorney representing Powerconnex, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirik is a former deputy legal director for both the Ohio Power Siting Board, which grants permits for electric generating facilities, and Ohio’s Public Utilities Commission.
Business Insider could not confirm who is behind Powerconnex Inc. However, there is a Virginia-based Powerconnex Inc. that shares a business address and three executive officers with data center company EdgeConnex.
EdgeConnex operates over 80 data centers in the US, Europe, and Asia. It is developing a data center in New Albany, Ohio, according to its website. In September, private credit company Sixth Street Partners announced it had acquired a minority stake in EdgeConneX.
New Albany, Ohio, a rural suburb northeast of Columbus, is home to several major data center projects. Amazon has committed to spending more than $23 billion on data center development in the state, and Microsoft, Meta, and Google also have projects in Ohio.
Recently, electricity demand in the region has soared. AEP Ohio, the Columbus utility that serves the major data centers, said last year that it had received 30 gigawatts of service requests. It asked state regulators to approve a separate rate class specifically for data center customers to protect other ratepayers from incurring additional costs due to the facilities’ demand. Hearings for the matter were held in January, although the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has not yet issued a final order.
Do you work in or have knowledge of the data center industry and have insight to share? Get in touch with this reporter at ethomas@insider.com or reach out via the encrypted messaging app Signal at +1-929-524-6924.
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