AI data centers with tens of thousands of accelerators running 24/7 consume huge amounts of energy. A new massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center being built in Indiana will use as much electricity as 1.5 million Indiana households, according to the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana. The state has never seen such a surge in energy consumption in its history, Government Technology reports.
A few years ago, AWS invested $87 million in a data center at the Port of AmeriPlex business park in Portage, and now it’s building an $11 billion data center in New Carlisle, east of LaPorte County. Experts say it’s the largest private investment in the state’s history, and it will create about 3,000 jobs, among other things. That last point is questionable.
Amazon says the 2.25 GW data center will have an average load level of 90%. It will consume about 17.7 GWh per year, according to Citizens Action Coalition calculations. By comparison, Indiana’s total “retail” electricity sales to households is 33.2 GWh, and the average household uses 12 MWh per year. In other words, the new data center will consume about half of what the state’s 2.8 million households currently use.
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AWS says it is taking steps to reduce its energy use by using energy-efficient technologies that can reduce consumption by 46 percent and reduce the “concrete carbon footprint” of construction by 35 percent compared to traditional data centers. The New Carlisle facility will be powered by Indiana and Michigan Power, which expects the data center to use twice as much energy as all of its current customers combined by 2030. There are 25 applications for large data centers in Indiana, according to the Citizens Action Coalition.
The environmental burden will also increase. Local utilities are proposing to expand the use of gas-fired power plants, and the governor is even proposing to keep coal plants, which would lead to increased emissions. In addition, utilities are planning to partially shift the cost of coal capacity from Michigan consumers to Indiana residents, explaining this by the growing demand from local data centers. I&M is also considering buying a natural gas power plant in Ohio.
Experts say that after years of declining greenhouse gas emissions, local energy companies will once again begin to pollute the atmosphere more intensively, and changes in the economics of energy costs are expected, but what exactly is still unknown. For example, energy companies are spending more on providing data centers with electricity, which leads to higher rates for ordinary consumers. For example, Duke Energy plans to invest $3.33 billion in a new gas-fired power plant in southern Indiana due to a sharp increase in demand from data centers.
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The costs of connectivity and infrastructure are shared among all users, not just the data center owners. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) estimates that the average data center consumes 50 times more energy than an office building of the same size. In the future, data centers will likely consume even more energy than steel mills. The rapid growth of large data centers creates unprecedented risks for ordinary consumers, since existing tariff systems do not protect them from sharply increasing electricity bills.
Indiana has become one of the promising locations for data centers. Thus, in January 2024, it was reported that Meta✴ would build one of its first data centers in the state, specially designed for generative AI for $800 million. In April of the same year, information appeared about Google building a data center campus for $2 billion, and in 2025, information was made public about the intention of Dubai-based DAMAC to enter the American market with $20 billion in investments, including for projects in Indiana.