Data centers were a factor in several economic outlook presentations at the Northwest Indiana Business Roundtable’s 10th annual event, evidence of their enormous impact on the region’s economy.
Data centers have an enormous appetite for electricity, which adds to their impact.
Kevin Comerford, director of professional development at the Construction Advancement Foundation, noted during Friday’s roundtable the impact of data centers on union construction jobs.
Amazon Web Services is investing more than $15 billion through the Hobart data center campus and Project Rise in Wheatfield. Microsoft’s LaPorte data center campus is a $1 billion initial investment and expected to grow to several billion dollars. Google’s Project Maize in Michigan City is a planned $832 million investment.
And that doesn’t count ones that have been proposed but not approved.
NiSource is investing $7 billion between NIPSCO’s Schahfer natural gas plant expansion and GenCo’s 500-megawatt battery storage facility at the former Mitchell Generating station. The battery storage includes 400 MW associated with Amazon’s data center campus in Hobart.
Together, these projects are creating hundreds of permanent jobs and thousands of union construction jobs, Comerford said.
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“It’s going to be a lot of work, especially for electricians,” he said, but others will be busy as well.
“The union construction workforce was just made for this,” Comerford said.
“It is going to be challenging in the next couple of years” to provide enough workers to build data centers, so unions will use workers from elsewhere in Indiana and other states to meet the need, he said.
Luke Wilson, chief policy officer with the Indiana Office of Energy Development, made a pitch for nuclear energy to help meet the increased demand.
Indiana is an island in the Midwest when it comes to nuclear plants, but that doesn’t mean no nuclear energy is used here.
Nuclear power generated in Michigan serves Indiana customers, too. Palisades Nuclear Plant is the first restart of a nuclear reactor in U.S. history, he said, producing 800 megawatts of electricity, 46% of which will serve Hoosier Energy, mainly southern Indiana electric cooperatives.
In 2007, nuclear energy accounted for 9% of Indiana’s power generation, along with 85.5% coal and 2.8% natural gas, he said. By 2025, coal’s share dropped to 40.4%, with natural gas at 32.6%, wind at 8.5%, solar at 5.5% and nuclear relatively steady at 10%.
“What’s causing the growth in solar and wind? Well, they’re cheap,” Wilson said. Once they’re installed, they have very little cost to operate.
“We’ve had huge reductions in emissions that are not talked about enough,” he said, by reducing reliance on coal. Indiana’s air quality had improved dramatically since 2000, with sulfur dioxide emissions down 96%, nitrogen oxide down 84% and carbon dioxide down 35%.
Take data centers out of the equation, and electricity demand wouldn’t really grow until the 2040s, Wilson said.
But the demand for cloud storage and artificial intelligence has grown so high that utilities are moving to increase capacity to serve customers.
Nuclear energy is a solid performer among various types of power generation, not slacking when the weather changes, Wilson said.
Aging coal-fired plants are costly to maintain, and some are past their expiration dates. “We need to replace 500MW of generation capacity by 2035,” he said, and 6.8 gigawatts of coal-fired generation is retiring by 2036. Converting coal plants to nuclear saves 15% to 35% in capital costs compared to greenfield sites, he said.
“Industry wants dispatchable, carbon-free generation to help make their products more attractive,” Wilson said, and nuclear fits that bill.
“We’re actually an island for nuclear power plants in the Midwest and really the country,” he said, but he sees that changing.
Small modular nuclear reactors are designed to be safer than traditional nuclear plants and have passive failsafe mechanisms, Wilson said. They’re quicker and easier to build, too.
The Defense Department plans to build two of them at the Crane naval base in Indiana, operational by 2029.
Gov. Mike Braun issued an executive order in April 2025 to establish the Nuclear Indiana Coalition and a moonshot goal of deploying a small modular reactor in Indiana within eight years. A Purdue study looked at eight potential sites for them. Each would employ 140 full-time workers and contribute $352 million annually to the local economy, double that of a coal plant, Wilson said.
The Office of Energy Development has a program to certify communities as nuclear-ready. Spencer County in southern Indiana is the first to achieve the designation, he said. Ten have submitted applications.
One of the perennial issues with nuclear power is how to deal with spent fuel. At Cook Nuclear Plant in Bridgman, Michigan, the spent pellets take up about half a football field, stored on site pending a federal decision on a permanent location.
Unlike in Europe, U.S. plants use only 7% to 8% of fuel density in pellets. “As you recycle, you’re able to use more,” Wilson said, but the federal government doesn’t allow that.
Wilson said to overcome opposition to nuclear power, communities should talk about nuclear plans instead of signing nondisclosure agreements. Hold town halls to discuss the issues, and bring in experts to talk about the facts vs. myths. “Hearing their story in some of these communities has been incredibly impactful,” Wilson said.
Marc Oestreich co-owns Crane+Grey and is founder of the American Capacity Project. He offered a facts vs. myths presentation on data centers. He explained what data centers do and why he believes investment is crucial not just for America but right here.
Opposition to data centers is evident, with some Northwest Indiana communities adopting moratoriums.
“The Chinese government is putting millions and millions of dollars into these campaigns” against data centers here, hoping they’ll be built in China instead, Oestreich said. He’d rather have the data centers here than be operated on what could be seen as enemy soil.
“Data centers are kind of ugly, square buildings,” he said.
“Essentially, it’s a really nice refrigerator full of computers. And it is that simple,” he said. “A server rack becomes a server hall.”
“Are they particularly mysterious? Not really,” he said.
“Artificial intelligence leverages computing in a way we historically haven’t,” Oestreich said. “It’s a different way to leverage the anatomy, but it’s the same anatomy.”
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In 2023, all data centers in the nation accounted for 4.4% of total electricity. “In three years’ time, it will be about 12% of all the power in America going to these data centers,” he said.
The most compelling case for data centers is their impact on medical science, he said.
“When we stop $250 billion in investments, we’re stopping medical advances,” Oestreich said.
A recent test in Germany showed AI-assisted breast cancer screening detected 17.6% more cancers without increasing false positives. Mayo Clinic researchers can spot signs of pancreatic cancer 16 months earlier than a normal diagnosis. The first FDA-approved adaptive deep-brain stimulation system now reads brain activity in Parkinson’s disease patients and adjusts treatment in real time.
“The cost of these moratorium stoppages over the last two years is about 1.7 million healthy lives. So yes, the cost is real,” he said.
Other scientific advances are worth noting. Automatic emergency braking has led to 50% fewer crashes. Fewer blackouts occur when utilities spot failures early. NASA is developing AI wildfire models that forecast fire and smoke at a resolution of 10 to 30 meters in just minutes.
“Data centers produce almost no pollution, almost no local traffic, almost no drain on local resources,” plus they generate lots of tax dollars.
“What might happen if we build these things,” skeptics wonder.
“What happens if we don’t build them?” Oestreich said. That means fewer construction jobs, fewer permanent careers, less work for local businesses, less revenue for schools and public safety, billions in lost investment, infrastructure upgrades lost, new power generation left unbuilt, investment redirected elsewhere, he said.
Northwest Indiana built the steel mills that built America. “We have the genetics built into us to build,” Oestreich said.
Build that next American innovation, “or we can rent it from our enemies. That’s a real choice before us,” he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.