A $40 MILLION LAKE-SIDE PROJECT

Digital Crossroad has just announced the availability of its newly constructed 20MW data center located at the border of Hammond, Michigan, Indiana.

Construction of the new facility is reported to have cost $40 million, and the building spans about 105,000 square feet. This Michigan data center is a transformation of an old coal power plant called the former State Line Generating Plant.

“We’ve been at this for more than two years after coming up with the idea of putting a data center in Northwest Indiana and the city of Hammond,” said Tom Dakich, an Indianapolis attorney and Digital Crossroad managing member.

“The leadership of the mayor, the governor and everybody on the county level made it easy for us to do this. Putting one of the largest data centers in the world in Hammond, Indiana was not easy, but it was made easy for us.”

Digital Crossroad owns and operates its own dark fiber network that extends from downtown Chicago to Uptown Hammond, through which the company offers access to providers and services that include Lit Wave Solutions, Dark Fiber IRU, Peering & Internet Exchanges, Cloud On-Ramp and Ethernet.

Last year, the government of Indiana signed into law, a bill that gives data centers significant tax exemptions of up to 50 years. The bill (INHB1405) was approved by Indiana Governor Eric J. Holcomb, which is aimed at attracting data center operators, investors and tech giants to the region as seen in the neighboring state Illinois.

According to Digital Crossroad, its new data center qualifies to benefit from the sales and use tax exemption in the state. This extends to tangible and intangible personal property that is essential to the operations of the data center, as well as the purchase of electricity used by data center equipment.

Sited by the shoreline of Lake Michigan, the data center uses water from the Lake to cool about half of its equipment. An onsite power substation and options for renewable power generation are also available on the new Digital Crossroad campus.