AWS Wheatfield (Project Rise) data center, Wheatfield, Indiana

Amazon Web Services' Project Rise, a $7 billion data center campus approved by Jasper County officials in June, is being built on 304 acres of NIPSCO land beside the Schahfer Generating Station in Wheatfield, Indiana. NIPSCO owns the land next to its coal plant, built in the 1970s; the utility once planned to close it, but in December 2025 the Trump administration ordered the remaining two coal units to stay open. The tenant is Amazon.

Dozens of residents filled a planning commission meeting on December 15, 2025, and the commission voted 8 to 1 against rezoning the land for the project. The county commissioners approved it anyway on February 2, 2026, voting unanimously. “We can say no today and we're still gonna get a data center,” commission president Rein Bontreger said after the vote. “This is a bunch of garbage!” said Barb Deardorff, a teachers' union organizer whose family has farmed the county for five generations.

NIPSCO's own groundwater monitoring around the coal ash landfill next to the site has found raised levels of molybdenum, lithium, cobalt and arsenic; the company says the contamination has not moved beyond the plant site. Sameer Doshi of Earthjustice said the landfill “is likely leaking and endangering the groundwater and health of everyone who lives around the Schahfer facility.” The county's approval came with nine commitments, including $98 million paid to the county in advance, $25 million toward expanding the water supply and 250 jobs.

The next decision belongs to the state: the Indiana Department of Environmental Management is renewing the Schahfer plant's wastewater discharge permit, which would authorize discharges from the coal and gas plant “as well as an adjacent data center” to Davis Ditch, Stahlbaum Ditch and the Kankakee River. IDEM will hold a virtual public hearing on October 7, 2026, and written comments are due by October 22, 2026.