Old Factories, Empty Offices Help Fuel Midwest Data Center Building Boom

The world`s largest tech companies have led a surge of data center construction across the Midwest with huge campuses for artificial intelligence. But the region`s next wave of build-out is expected to involve smaller facilities, with developers seeing opportunities to repurpose defunct industrial sites and languishing office space as AI processing centers. 

From the suburbs of Chicago and Columbus, Ohio, to rural counties in Wisconsin and Iowa, tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are building gigawatt-scale data center campuses to train the AI models on which Big Tech has pinned its future.

While public attention has largely concentrated on hyperscale projects, prominent voices in the data center industry say there is an emerging wave of development across the region for inference: smaller facilities housing the computing power necessary for individuals and businesses to utilize AI.

As AI data center demand shifts towards inference, developers are taking advantage of infrastructure built in the Midwest’s industrial past. The region has many former manufacturing facilities with access to large blocks of electricity they no longer use, as well as power infrastructure built by utilities for factories that never materialized as U.S. manufacturing declined.

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RSK: Great reuse of property in my book. Although they are not the giant mega data centers, these type of properties are perfect for the next level of data center. The Midwest is perfect for them, including Wisconsin.