Pittsboro officials OK rezoning of 626 acre-site for proposed data center campus

The Pittsboro Town Council has unanimously approved a rezoning request that would allow a data center campus to be built on a 626-acre site in the Hendricks County town.

The property is owned by Charles D. Smith Family Farm Inc. and located in the northeast corner of Pittsboro, is just north of Interstate 74 and west of County Road 500 East. The site was formerly zoned for agricultural use, and Pittsboro leaders annexed the property into the town late last year.

On Tuesday night, Pittsboro’s town council approved Denver-based Vantage Data Centers’ rezoning request for the property. Vantage has already submitted plans to the town for a data center campus that would occupy about 285 acres of the 626-acre site. The plans call for multiple one- or two-story structures with facades that look like office buildings.

This would be what is known as a colocation site—a data center with multiple tenants rather than a single user.

At last month’s Pittsboro Advisory Plan Commission meeting, members of that group voted 4-1 to recommend approval of the rezoning request. Several residents at that meeting spoke out both in opposition to and in support of the project.

Some of the concerns already voiced about the project include its location and the kind of commercial development the project might spark, especially since the data center, as planned, would occupy less than half of the acreage considered for rezoning.

“We want to make sure that we’re looking at not bringing in just whatever, whoever wants to build after this,” Pittsboro resident Matt Mazelin said in February.

The video stream of Tuesday’s town council meeting showed what looked to be a full house of spectators for the meeting, but public comments were not allowed.

After the vote had taken place, Town Council President Jarod Baker spoke about another concern he had heard: local electrical capacity. Baker said he had been approached by a representative from Steel Dynamics Inc. who  expressed “a rightful concern” about the capacity of the local electrical grid to handle the power needs of both Steel Dynamics and the proposed data center. Steel Dynamics has a production site in Pittsboro.

Baker said offered to facilitate conversations with Wabash Valley Power Alliance and Hendricks Power Cooperative so those entities can address the steelmaker’s concerns.

The Pittsboro project is among one of several large-scale data center projects that have been proposed or are under way in central Indiana.

Morgan County’s three-member Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a rezoning request last month for a 391-acre site in the northern part of the county, where an undisclosed developer and end user plan to build a data center campus.

And late last year, Meta announced a 1,500-acre development in Lebanon’s LEAP Research and Innovation District.