SHALERSVILLE TOWNSHIP, Ohio — A local developer and a global tech firm hope to bring a major data center project to Portage County, to an emerging business park just north of the Ohio Turnpike.
Bitdeer has a contract to buy about 257 acres at the Turnpike Commerce Center in Shalersville Township. The publicly traded company, based in Singapore, aims to fill much of that site with a 15-building computing hub to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence.
Executives from Bitdeer and Geis Cos., the business-park developer, outlined their vision in interviews with News 5 this week. They’ve scheduled an open house Friday for township residents. A broader public meeting about the project will take place at 5:30 p.m. on June 16 at Shalersville Township Hall.
“We’ve been longtime residents here in Portage County. We’re not the out-of-town group that comes in and doesn’t care about local concern,” said Conrad Geis, president of Geis Development and a third-generation member of the family-owned real estate and construction business, which is based in nearby Streetsboro.
A wave of data center projects is sweeping across Ohio, putting public officials and neighbors on edge. In Northeast Ohio, many communities are pressing pause on permitting and construction as they try to understand what data centers are, where they fit — and what the risks and rewards might be.
RELATED: Is a data center a blessing or a curse? Depends on the community.
On Wednesday, a joint legislative committee in Columbus held the first of several planned hearings about the data center boom.
Shalersville, with roughly 5,000 residents, has a moratorium that doesn’t end until early November. It would need to expire or be lifted for Geis and Bitdeer to move forward.
Township Trustee Ron Kotkowski told News 5 that officials imposed the moratorium so they could educate themselves and create better regulations, including expectations for how data centers will handle lights, noise, landscaping, building sizes and utilities.
“We have not made any decisions and are keeping an open mind,” Kotkowski said, adding that the trustees also want safeguards around electricity consumption and costs, water use and fire suppression.
“Moratoriums are a good thing when people are … actually educating themselves to make good, qualified decisions,” said Paul Hanson, Bitdeer’s senior project manager. “And that’s all we can ask.”
He and Geis said they welcome questions about the project. And in this landscape, with so much pushback against data centers and plenty of misinformation swirling around on social media, they know they’ve got some convincing to do.
“Our doors are open,” Geis said. “I’m happy to meet with anyone and everyone.”
'The digital age in Ohio'
The Shalersville campus would be Bitdeer’s largest facility in the United States, with an initial power capacity of 150 megawatts and the potential to expand to 750 megawatts if the whole campus gets built. That’s enough power to run hundreds of thousands of homes.
Hanson said the company is committed to paying for the electricity it requires, along with any upgrades to distribution and transmission equipment to serve the project.
Bitdeer is heavily focused on the United States and particularly bullish on Ohio, with projects on the drawing board or underway in Trumbull, Stark and Monroe counties.
“This state was built on steel, on manufacturing, on textiles, and now a lot of those places have gone away,” Hanson said. “And now we’re in the digital age in Ohio. The climate is fantastic for doing data centers, crypto-mining centers. There’s power available. … And then the people here are fantastic.”
On 31 acres in Massillon, about an hour’s drive southwest of Shalersville, Bitdeer is wrapping up construction on a 26-building cryptocurrency-mining facility. That project ran into some supply-chain delays, according to regulatory filings, and two buildings were damaged during a construction fire in November. But the development should be complete by October, Hanson said.
The Shalersville project, on a much larger site, would look similar to what neighbors in Massillon are seeing.
Bitdeer is proposing a procession of small data halls, each of them about 48,000 square feet, instead of massive warehouses. The company would use sound walls, earth mounds and plants to dampen noise from cooling equipment at the buildings.
The first phase of the project would span two data halls and a 51,500-square-foot office building at the southwestern end of the property.
With a closed-loop cooling system that recycles liquid to keep the hardware inside from overheating, the first group of buildings would use only 350 gallons of water a day, Hanson said. That’s less than the typical American household uses.
Geis already worked with the county to bring water and sewer lines to the business park. The project won't involve any wells.
A site plan shows 12 additional data halls in the second phase of the project.
The entire campus would take about five years to build. Bitdeer says construction will cost more than $300 million — but that doesn’t include the company’s equipment.
Hanson said Bitdeer isn’t asking for tax breaks for the Shalersville development, at a moment when data center subsidies are a controversial topic across Ohio.
RELATED: Ohio's spending billions on tax breaks for data centers. Now an incentive battle is brewing.
A conversation with U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Westlake Republican, shaped the company’s approach. Moreno has been an outspoken critic of subsidies for data center projects.
“So I sat with our founder, Jihan Wu, and he said ‘You know what, let’s not ask for tax incentives. We’ll build this for ourselves,’” Hanson said.
The first phase of the project would create 30 to 50 long-term jobs. The finished campus would support 150 to 200 employees, at estimated salaries ranging from about $50,000 to $120,000 a year. Hanson said a lot of that hiring would be local.
“If you’ve got a will to work, we’ll gladly hire you and then train you to do those jobs,” he said, referring to careers in engineering, operations and other areas.
Bitdeer expects the first phase of the development to generate $2.17 million a year in property-tax revenues. If tax revenues fall below that amount, the company will offer to make up the difference for the county and the township.
'Data centers, we don't know about'
Jim Elsey lives about a quarter of a mile away from the proposed development site, on a 40-acre farm that keeps him busy. Lately, he’s even busier reading up on data centers and the potential pitfalls of welcoming tech development.
“It’s a whole range of emotions and thoughts,” said Elsey, who said he’s not opposed to technology — but he’s against this project. He’s particularly worried about water use.
Kotkowski said the other businesses at Turnpike Commerce Center aren’t putting a strain on community resources. Viega, a German maker of copper plumbing parts, opened a major manufacturing facility there last year. A vitamin and supplement company leased about 40% of a massive warehouse and distribution building at one edge of the site.
At one point, Geis envisioned a series of warehouses spanning more than 7 million square feet at the park. But economic shifts and the data center boom changed those plans.
“Responsible data center development can be done,” Geis said. “I can’t speak for what else has happened throughout the country, or here in Ohio. But … there are ways of putting guardrails up, which is what we’ve been trying to do along the way.”
Local officials are still figuring out where they stand.
The township trustees once considered banning data centers altogether, but decided against that after talking with the county prosecutor’s office.
“They said ‘you can ban it, but you’ll lose in court,'” Kotkowski said.
He believes Turnpike Commerce Center is probably the best development site in all of Portage County, with its freeway access and proximity to power lines.
“We welcome some light industrial … to keep our community solvent,” Kowkowski said of the business park. “And they have been a good fit so far. Data centers, we don’t know about. We’re learning.”
Michelle Jarboe is the business growth and development reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow her on X @MJarboe or email her at Michelle.Jarboe@wews.com.
