This article was featured in the Daily Prospect newsletter. Sign up for it here. NEW ALBANY, OHIO – As Karen Bucher, standing on her front porch, started to describe the noise she said keeps her and her husband up at night, a massive boom thundered across the few remaining fields around their subdivision in Licking County, Ohio.

The Buchers’ home is one of 37 in a loop around Bermuda Drive, now surrounded by data centers and construction sites owned by Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, as well as a massive microchip factory being built by Intel.

The Buchers and their neighbors are the last holdouts here in the New Albany epicenter of Ohio’s tech and data center boom, but within a year, they said, they too will leave, and all their homes will be demolished. Karen, a former teacher, and her husband Denton, a former union pipefitter, said they purchased this home more than two decades ago when they retired, moving from Toledo to spend summers here outside Columbus, near to their son. For months, they said, they have been negotiating with representatives of the New Albany Company, owned by billionaire Leslie Wexner, to sell their home. The rumor, they said, is that Meta wants this land too. The tech giant already owns the parcels directly east and north of the neighborhood through a subsidiary LLC, where it has rapidly constructed at least 12 data centers in tentlike structures since last September.

While they said the exact move-out date is yet to be determined, the Buchers are already going through their basement, packing up 23 years of life in this home. As neighbors negotiated individually or in groups, they said, they have been subject to a nondisclosure agreement preventing them from discussing prices, a common practice employed by companies hoping to develop in the area. The Prospect in your inbox Analysis that goes beyond the noise with in-depth, progressive reporting.

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But the payoff looks set to be huge. The two homes directly behind theirs posted sales this month to an LLC owned by the New Albany Company for $1.18 million and $1.35 million, respectively, between $600,000 and $700,000 per acre. Those parcels resemble the two-acre plot the Buchers purchased for just over $100,000 per acre in 2003, which was valued by the county auditor this year at just $442,300.

The Buchers said they no longer want to live here, surrounded by the data center noise and construction dust. But despite the financial benefit, they also feel forced out.

Underlying the data center boom that has spread across the United States is a very tangible new land market, full of winners and losers. In the fastest–developing areas, like the branded “Silicon Heartland” of Central Ohio, small landowners and homeowners are trying to figure out how to either profit and get out, or fight to stay in their homes. Meanwhile, large investors like Wexner’s New Albany Company make huge profits assembling construction-ready land. And as data centers have become a key political issue, including in the critical upcoming Ohio governor and Senate elections, questions of property tax breaks also tied to the land may be key for who wins and who loses.

ALMOST TWO MILES DUE EAST FROM BERMUDA DRIVE, though the trip now requires an additional two-mile detour around the Intel construction site, Josh Cyrus lives just past the last tech development, for now. He said his wife and two young children have fallen in love with this home, surrounded by trees and a pond overlooked by a quaint swinging seat, since they purchased it last year.

However, Cyrus added, part of the reason for purchasing here was the thought that the data center developments might continue their eastward expansion, returning their investment on this house and much more. Already, the houses next to and behind the young family have been purchased by another New Albany Company subsidiary LLC, though unlike on Bermuda Drive, there has been no concerted effort to buy out the street yet. But Cyrus said he thinks the spread of development is “inevitable.”

Next door, Erin King, who has lived in her red ranch house for two decades, said she remembers construction had already started when President Joe Biden announced the Intel chip fab to be built just steps from her front door in 2022, describing the area as “a thousand empty acres of land.”King said she hopes to stay in her home, but that she too would sell if the developers came knocking. She lamented that she would be unable to get as nice a house anywhere near Columbus for the same price, and complained about the traffic the construction has brought to their once quiet, rural road.

On the other side of the Meta data center developments, Andrew Maciejewski said he has already been forced to make the same choice. He and his family have relocated nearly 40 miles away, to Amanda, Ohio, much farther from his workplace in Columbus, in order to maintain their rural lifestyle. Maciejewski expressed fear that, had he tried to avoid selling, he could have been left like a few holdouts in the area, passed up and fully surrounded by data centers with a completely undesirable home.

He sold his land to an LLC owned by Karis Critical, an industrial developer whose website subsequently advertised the site as a “fully entitled, shovel-ready 113.5-acre data center campus in Central Ohio’s premier technology corridor.”The language in that points to why Big Tech chose this place, and to the process by which it became the Silicon Heartland, one of the largest technology clusters in the country.

As data center developments nationwide face significant challenges in the form of power shortages and community opposition, New Albany’s friendliness to land assembly, annexation, and development provided a key advantage.

Among the Silicon Heartland’s earliest tech developments was Meta’s New Albany Data Center, now the south end of the New Albany International Business Park. Construction began in 2017, and the campus, distinct from the New Albany North campus surrounding Bermuda Drive, has since expanded to include 13 data center buildings.

But the process of assembling the land underneath the first section of the campus started years earlier. Property records from the Licking County Recorder show that the earliest land purchases occurred in 2000, years before the data center boom. That year, four owners of undeveloped farmland off Beech Road in rural Jersey Township sold to MBJ Holdings LLC, a subsidiary of the New Albany Company registered in Delaware just one year prior, at prices ranging from $8,250 to $18,350 per acre.

For a decade, nothing happened. Then at the end of 2011, 16 more properties ranging from half-acre homes to a 36-acre farmland plot were transferred to MBJ Holdings LLC in a six-month period, rounding out a contiguous 323-acre property. The sellers, all of whom had signed a petition to annex the entire unincorporated area to the city of New Albany just before the first sale posted, received anywhere from $25,000 to $345,000 per acre, meaning they likely had no idea of the going rate when they signed their sale contracts or the petition.

After 2012, the land and the homes sat for another five years. In 2017, records show the property was transferred to another LLC associated with a title company, then back to MBJ Holdings before being sold to Sidecat LLC, owned by Meta. Altogether, Meta paid more than $36 million for the 323 acres of land under the first five buildings of its data center. The New Albany Company had spent approximately $8 million (including estimates for two parcels with unavailable records and four parcels whose prices were prorated as they were split to form the final site) for that same land.

John Romano, one of those who sold land at that time, said, “I did not know what they were doing with it, but I knew it was the New Albany Company.”He said he had previously sold land in the area to shell companies that turned out to be owned by the New Albany Company. Asked how he felt about the price he had received and the massive increase in value since, representing upward of $28 million in profit on just this 323-acre plot, Romano said, “You cannot fight progress, you can just try to get the best deal.”

AT THE INTEL SITE, WEXNER’S NEW ALBANY COMPANY followed a similar playbook. In just a few months in 2021 and 2022, the company assembled more than 700 acres via another subsidiary, MCVGCM Holdings LLC, from 52 landowners and homeowners, and then annexed it to the city of New Albany. For that land, the company paid upward of $70 million (including estimates for three properties for which records were not available). Just months later, Intel purchased the land via its own subsidiary, Growth Site LLC, for more than $110 million, equaling a land profit of up to $40 million for the New Albany Company.

Subsidiaries of the New Albany Company played a similar role in dozens of land sales to the more than 60 operating or planned data centers in the area. Much of the land in this area was farmlands owned by families for decades, some going back generations. These family farms were bought, annexed, rezoned, leveled, and made impervious with asphalt and concrete, leaving no traces of the previous tall cornstalks, old oak trees, homes, village roads, barns, and numerous small wetlands. All were subsumed into one development: the New Albany International Business Park, which now spreads over 10,000 acres.

As moratoriums and bans on data center development have spread across Ohio and the country, tech companies are continuing to spend big on “shovel-ready” land in business-friendly municipalities like New Albany, where Wexner and the New Albany Company maintain a strong influence in local politics. Alongside the companies investing directly in AI and in data center and other technology infrastructure, those able to assemble such land, keeping their payouts low with NDAs and quick deals and shepherding it through annexations and rezonings, have made immense profits.

This November, Ohioans will go to the polls to vote, in part, on the future of tech developments. Data centers have become a hot-button issue in the races for both governor and the Senate, with Democrats accusing Republicans of profiting from and failing to regulate the developments. Recent polls by four independent agencies in Ohio showed over 70 percent of respondents against construction of data centers in their localities, regardless of political party or age.

Alongside energy consumption and environmental concerns, voters hate the tax breaks, including property tax breaks, that the projects have received in the millions of dollars. Cities and counties across Ohio have offered data centers property tax abatements, mostly via Ohio’s Community Reinvestment Area (CRA) Program. Under these agreements, local governments offer up to 100 percent property tax exemptions for 15 to 30 years. Some of the richest tech companies—Meta, Amazon, Google—are the beneficiaries of these exemptions, and all have received 100 percent property tax abatements in Ohio under CRA, money that would have otherwise gone to the school districts that rely on property tax revenues.

It is difficult to access information related to local property tax abatements, as state officials often refuse to share such information, which is often located across multiple state and local agencies. What’s more, it is typically unclear which tech company is building the data centers or who benefits from tax exemptions in their localities, even when residents get the documents. As a recent report showed, instead of seeing the names of the parent companies, residents often see the names of the subsidiaries like Montauk (for Google) or Sidecat (for Meta).

Even city councilmembers who vote on these tax exemptions may not know the names of the parent companies when they approve applications. For instance, in March 2021, the city of Columbus approved a 100 percent 15-year CRA tax exemption worth $54 million (that would create 20 permanent jobs) for a company named Magellan Enterprises LLC. At the time of voting, the councilmembers were reportedly unaware that Google was the actual beneficiary of the tax subsidy; they only learned months later that Magellan is a subsidiary of Google.

THE LARGEST TAX BENEFIT THAT OHIO OFFERS to data centers is in the form of sales tax, which covers taxes on the purchase of computer equipment and materials. In 2025, the sales tax exemption for data centers cost Ohio $1.5 billion, 11 times more than the state tax department’s forecast. This number doesn’t even include local sales tax breaks, which cost $166.8 million in 2024. A company must make a capital investment of $100 million over three years and maintain an annual payroll of $1.5 million to qualify for the exemption.

Amazon (via its affiliate Vadata, Inc.) was one of the first beneficiaries of this exemption. It signed an agreement for a full sales tax exemption in 2014 that could go on till 2055 if the company met the investment threshold. At the time of the agreement, the estimated cost to the state in terms of uncollected tax revenue was $77 million, per Zach Schiller, an economist and research director at Policy Matters Ohio, who further noted that “this could end up costing 20 times that much,” given the open-ended nature of these agreements.

Three years later, Meta (via Sidecat LLC) signed an agreement (which could last till 2056), followed by Google (via Montauk Innovations LLC) the following year. All these agreements promise job creation that ranges between 30 (Google), 50 (Meta), and 120 (Amazon) jobs. Per Schiller’s estimation, given the extent of state and local taxes forgone, it costs the state nearly $1 million to create one job.

As reported by Bloomberg Tax in January 2026, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority had 19 active data center sales tax exemption agreements worth $549 million at the time ofg, with the promise of 496 jobs and an investment worth $13 billion. However, it’s not easy for ordinary Ohioans to access these agreements or the annual reports that companies are mandated to file, since these agreements may give companies the right to reject public disclosure of the reports, Schiller explained.

In May 2026, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine paused further tax exemptions to data centers following reports of gross miscalculation of forgone taxes, but the pause is temporary and applies only to new data center proposals, not those agreements that have already been signed. The previous year, Ohio lawmakers quietly passed legislation (House Bill 184) making key information about local economic development assistance confidential. That means residents may have less access to basic details about what companies promised, what they received, and whether the public got a fair deal.

The bill’s secrecy implication is so alarming that one of the county auditors in Ohio publicly criticized the bill in a column in the local newspaper.

As Ohioans head to the polls in two weeks, along with issues surrounding rising costs of food and fuel, concerns around data centers will determine their votes. Meanwhile, the people in and around the Silicon Heartland’s biggest center in New Albany make plans for where to move.