Project dossier · New Carlisle (St. Joseph County), Indiana

AWS Northern Indiana expansion (New Carlisle) Operating

Amazon plans a $15B investment in new Northern Indiana data center campuses, additional to the $11B investment announced the prior year in St. Joseph County, where its New Carlisle data center already operates. Amazon secures 2.4 GW for its needs (3 GW total new grid capacity) and, through NIPSCO Generation LLC arrangements, will pay to use existing power lines and cover new power plant costs. Amazon says the expansion creates 1,100+ direct high-skilled jobs.

Key facts

Operator: Amazon (AWS)
Owner: Amazon
Tenant: AWS
Size: 2,400 MW
Location: New Carlisle (St. Joseph County), Indiana
Stage today: Operating

Source
read 2026-08-14

What to do next

Next step: Already operating — the leverage now is enforcement: noise and water conditions, tax revenue tracking, and any expansion filing, which reopens the record.

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What has happened so far (16 events)

undatedannouncement
Amazon announced a $15B plan for new Northern Indiana data center campuses on top of the earlier $11B St. Joseph County investment, with 2.4 GW of power secured via a NIPSCO cost-coverage arrangement. (Amazon's page carries no publication date; the announcement date is not asserted here.) · source
2023-11-09announcement
St. Joseph County approved a development facilitation agreement with shell company Razor5 LLC to evaluate 840 acres of farmland near New Carlisle for light-industrial use; Razor5 deposited $1 million in escrow for survey rights. · source
2024-02-22rezoning
St. Joseph County Plan Commission recommended rezoning 640 acres south of the Indiana Enterprise Center from agricultural to industrial for the Razor5 project; a county council vote was scheduled for the following week. · source
2024-04-10filing
Razor5 LLC presented preliminary plans to the St. Joseph County Council showing a potential total project investment of approximately $11 billion and filed a real property tax abatement application; the company behind Razor5 had not yet been publicly identified. · source
2024-04-25announcement
Governor Holcomb announced that Amazon Web Services would invest $11 billion to build a data center campus at the Indiana Enterprise Center near New Carlisle, creating at least 1,000 jobs — the largest capital investment in Indiana history. · source
2024-08-13vote
St. Joseph County Council voted 7-2 to approve a 10-year 50% property tax abatement and a 35-year enterprise technology exemption (85% on data center equipment) for Amazon; the package included a $143 million community enhancement agreement for parks, schools, fire departments, and infrastructure. · source
2024-09-30construction
AWS held a ceremonial groundbreaking at the Century Center in South Bend for its $11 billion data center campus on 870 acres near New Carlisle; construction was already underway, with the first four of 16 planned buildings targeted for completion by end of 2024. · source
2025-04-30hearing
More than 100 people attended an IDEM public hearing in New Carlisle on Amazon's Section 401 water quality certification application to fill approximately 10 acres of wetlands and reroute streams in the Kankakee River watershed; the Hoosier Environmental Council argued the proposed mitigation was insufficient. · source
2025-08-13ruling
IDEM cited Amazon for impacting nearly one acre of wetlands without authorization at the New Carlisle campus, ordered construction in state waters to cease, and required Amazon to withdraw its January 2025 permit application and resubmit with an additional 30% mitigation requirement. · source
2025-08-14filing
Amazon announced plans to resubmit its IDEM wetland permit application after acknowledging its contractor Walbridge had impacted wetlands without authorization in late summer 2024; Amazon had not notified IDEM of the incident until May 2025. · source
2025-09-24ruling
The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved NiSource's petition to create NIPSCO Generation LLC (GenCo), a first-in-the-nation subsidiary utility to own, build, and manage generation assets exclusively for data centers in Northern Indiana, shielding existing NIPSCO retail customers from related costs. · source
2025-10-29operational
Amazon announced that Project Rainier, its $11 billion data center campus in New Carlisle dedicated to training Anthropic's Claude AI models on approximately 500,000 Trainium2 chips, was now operational; CNBC reported it as the company's biggest AI data center. · source
2025-11-24announcement
Amazon announced an additional $15 billion investment to build new data center campuses in Northern Indiana, adding up to 3 GW of capacity; NIPSCO would supply power under a 15-year contract beginning January 2027, with GenCo planning two 1.3 GW gas plants and 400 MW of battery storage. · source
2026-06-24report
Four Republican St. Joseph County Council members sent a letter to Amazon requesting voluntary contributions toward homeowner property tax relief, noting AWS had nearly $38 million in abated property taxes in the first half of 2026 alone. · source
2026-07-10coverage
Indiana Citizen reported that the New Carlisle campus had 935 full-time employees as of December 2025 (average $40.99/hour), with construction traffic more than doubling the town's population daily at peak; Amazon requested permanent filling of over 9 acres of wetlands and rerouting of 5,000 feet of streams. · source
2026-07-23construction
WNDU reported that AWS investment in the St. Joseph County campus had surpassed $13.8 billion, with approximately 18 of 30 planned buildings operational and over 1,000 people hired; a planned diverging diamond interchange at SR 2 and Larrison Boulevard had not yet begun construction. · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (0 filed · 12 places to look)

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

Indiana IDEM — Office of Air QualityThe program page: which permits this state requires, and the office that issues them.
IDEM Virtual File CabinetSearchable public filings — search the operator, the shell LLC on the deed, and the address.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

Search New Carlisle (St. Joseph County) planning filingssearchPlanning departments post application files under many different names. Find the department, then ask the clerk for the application number — that number unlocks everything else.
Search New Carlisle (St. Joseph County) property records / GISsearchThe parcel record names the buying LLC and the sale date, which is what ties an anonymous filing to an operator.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

MISO (Midwest & Gulf) — interconnection queueRequested megawatts, queue position and target in-service date. The MW here is the real number; the one at the town meeting is often phase one.
PJM Interconnection (Mid-Atlantic, Ohio Valley) — interconnection queueRequested megawatts, queue position and target in-service date. The MW here is the real number; the one at the town meeting is often phase one.
Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission — docket searchSpecial contracts, large-load tariffs and rate cases are docketed here. Testimony and exhibits are public, and are usually more candid than the press release.
FERC eLibraryFederal filings: transmission agreements, interconnection service agreements, and co-location disputes.
Search the serving utility for a will-serve lettersearchThe will-serve or load-service letter is the utility's own written commitment. Ask the utility and the PUC for it by name — it is frequently the first document to exist.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 41.700, -86.510 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Around here

Indiana briefing — rates, grid carbon, PUC contacts.

Other tracked projects in Indiana

Anthropic-Amazon New Carlisle — New Carlisle, 0 mi Operating
Abei Energy data center proposal (rezoning request) — Starke County, 26 mi Blocked by ban
Decennial Group Akron Data Center Campus (proposed) — Fulton County (Akron), 52 mi Blocked by ban
Wolcott Data Center (Mid-America Commerce Park) — White County, 71 mi Awaiting decision
Google Fort Wayne — Fort Wayne, 85 mi Operating

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “AWS Northern Indiana expansion (New Carlisle)”, aigridwatch.com/projects/aws-new-carlisle-in, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).