What Do You Do With a Data Center?

(To the tune of “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor”)

Google may have walked away from Franklin Township, but Indy still has to answer the bigger question: where do you stick a massive server farm that slurps power like free beer at the Antelope Club?

Let’s walk through the real-world options inside the city limits.

AmeriPlex: The Obvious Answer

If you’re playing SimCity, the logical spot is AmeriPlex by the airport. It’s Indy’s flagship industrial park, with thousands of acres already carved up for warehouses, distribution centers, and manufacturers. Holladay Properties runs the show, and while most of the land is spoken for, you can still piece together 40 to 100 acres if you’ve got patience and a checkbook the size of AES Indiana’s transmission lines.

The advantages are obvious: close to the airport’s cargo hub, direct interstate access, existing utilities — and, best of all, it’s already zoned for commercial and industrial use. No rezoning battles, no neighborhood protests, no planning commission headaches. The downside? Price. Land in AmeriPlex runs around $100,000 to $150,000 an acre. A 100-acre data campus will cost you $10–15 million before you even plug in the first server.

Still, if Indianapolis wants the path of least resistance, this is it. It’s shovel-ready, it’s boring, and it works. Sometimes boring is good.

62nd Street in Lawrence: The Sleeper Pick

Another possibility sits at 11805 E. 62nd Street on the east side. This is a rare single parcel of roughly 75 acres inside Marion County — big enough to house a decent-sized facility without the headaches of stitching together dozens of smaller lots. It’s close to I-465 and Pendleton Pike, and it sits near AES Indiana’s Winding Ridge 138kV substation, which was designed to serve new east-side commercial loads. Translation: the power hookups make sense.

On the plus side, it’s one big piece of dirt in a city where large tracts are scarce, and it’s near major corridors for both water and fiber. On the minus side, it’s not yet zoned heavy industrial, and the jurisdictional lines between the City of Lawrence and the City of Indianapolis could complicate approvals. If AmeriPlex is the easy button, this is the “maybe” button — promising, but with fine print in the footnotes.

SimCity 2000, No Cheat Codes

But here’s the problem: trying to site a hyperscale data center in Indianapolis is a lot like playing SimCity 2000 without cheat codes. You don’t get infinite money, you can’t bulldoze half a neighborhood without consequences, and if you plop a power-hungry cube in the wrong place, your citizens will riot. The difference is in SimCity, you can hit reset. In real life, you’re stuck with the politics, the power bills, and the neighbors.

Martindale-Brightwood: The Fantasy

On the other end of the spectrum is Martindale-Brightwood. It’s a proud historic neighborhood on the near northeast side, full of churches, houses, and small businesses. What it doesn’t have is vacant 50-acre tracts of industrial land. If you wanted to put a hyperscale data center there, you’d need to buy up hundreds of tiny parcels, knock down blocks of housing, and explain to residents why their property taxes are funding a giant box humming with servers.

Good luck with that. Unless your business plan includes eminent domain and a witness protection program, Martindale-Brightwood is not your answer. It’s a great neighborhood, but it’s not going to become Silicon Valley South.

Washington Square Mall: The Wild Card

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Washington Square Mall on the east side is the poster child for retail decline. Once nearly a million square feet of shopping, today it’s mostly empty corridors, a couple of struggling stores, and more pigeons than customers. The property, owned by Durga Property LLC, sits on 40 to 80 acres once devoted to parking and outlots.

On paper, it’s perfect. One owner, one big tract, good interstate access, and utilities already in place. The mall itself could be demolished, and the site could be reborn as a state-of-the-art data campus. You’d be swapping the food court for fiber lines, Orange Julius for orange Ethernet cables.

The catch? Redevelopment is expensive. Demolition alone could run into the millions. Zoning will need to change from retail to industrial. And there will be political questions: does the east side want to trade the dream of “revitalized retail” for the reality of a big, windowless cube filled with servers?

The Power Question: AES Transmission

All the land in the world won’t matter if you can’t light it up. A hyperscale data center can pull 50 to 150 megawatts — the kind of load that normally powers a small city. That means you’re not wiring into the strip mall transformer down the street. You need to sit on top of AES Indiana’s 138kV transmission network.

  • AmeriPlex is already in AES’s industrial backyard, with substations and transmission lines built to serve airport cargo and logistics giants. Flip a switch and you’re in business.

  • 62nd Street in Lawrence is near AES’s Winding Ridge 138kV substation, upgraded specifically to handle new commercial and industrial growth on the east side. That’s why that parcel is even worth talking about.

  • Washington Square Mall has retail-level juice, not server-farm juice. AES would need to extend or beef up transmission, which means money, permits, and patience.

  • Martindale-Brightwood is built for houses and small businesses. Dropping a 138kV line into the neighborhood would be like trying to run the IndyCar Series down a residential cul-de-sac.

In short: pick the wrong spot, and AES will have to rebuild half the grid to keep your servers humming.

The Bigger Picture

The truth is that Indy has very few sites inside city limits that can host a large-scale data center. AmeriPlex is the safe bet. The 62nd Street site is the sleeper. Washington Square is the gamble. Martindale-Brightwood is the cautionary tale.

But the larger issue is strategic: does Indianapolis want to be in the data-center business at all? These facilities bring tax base and some construction jobs, but once built they don’t employ many people. They do, however, consume massive amounts of power and water, which puts them on a collision course with both utility planners and neighborhood activists.

And yet, here’s the irony: everyone uses them. At Monday night’s City-County Council meeting, one of the loudest protesters against a proposed data center was literally reading her remarks from her phone. I asked her, “Don’t you get your data from a data center on your phone?” She shot back, “I don’t use AI.” Which, of course, wasn’t my point. The point is that your texts, your calls, your videos, your TikToks, your bank balance—they all live in a data center somewhere.

That’s why I say data centers are like going to heaven: everybody wants their data, but nobody wants the data center that makes it possible. In the end, it’s like laws and sausage—everybody consumes them, nobody wants to watch how they’re made.