Google Columbus data center, Columbus, Ohio

Google's data center on South High Street in Columbus, in Franklin County, Ohio, stands on what was Hartman Stock Farm, a 5,000 acre spread founded in 1903 by the patent medicine millionaire Samuel B. Hartman. The farm was on the National Register of Historic Places from October 9, 1974 until February 10, 2022, when the listing was removed. By then most of the farm buildings were gone, leaving the foreman's house, one dairy barn, a single room schoolhouse and one other residence. Columbus City Council approved a zoning change and a $54 million tax abatement for the project over protests from local residents and the Columbus Landmarks Foundation.

The campus opened in 2022 as the anchor of Google's us-east5 cloud region. Google says it has put more than $20 billion into Ohio since breaking ground at New Albany in 2019, and now runs data centers in New Albany, Lancaster and Columbus. The company describes the staffing as hundreds of full term and contractor roles across the state rather than at any one site.

On March 11, 2026, council president Shannon Hardin called an informational hearing at City Hall on what data centers are doing to the city, covering energy use, water demand, jobs and land. Robert Hackney, who moved to a south Columbus neighborhood next to the site in 2019, remembered it before Google began building: "It was country, you know, quiet, peaceful," he said. Of the change since, he said: "Oh, it's terrible. It's upside down." Asked whether he would want one near him, Hackney said: "I would say I wouldn't have it. I wouldn't have it in my backyard."

Six months later the council chose rules over a ban. Council member Christopher Wyche brought forward measures to set new rates and charges for high volume water users including data centers, to require water conservation plans, to lay down how a large data center must be decommissioned, and to deal with the pollution from power generated on site behind the meter. The water rate measure had its first reading in the week of September 17, 2026 and could reach a final vote at the next meeting. "If we're only charging a mega user, for how much water they use, we're missing the broader point of how much infrastructure they're actually requiring," Hardin said, arguing that data centers should be fully covering their own cost. Wyche said that passing a moratorium "would be performative where we're trying to be constructive. We have the ability to create a regulatory framework."

A Bowling Green State University poll of 1,000 likely voters found 78 percent in favor of a temporary ban on new data centers, including over 90 percent of Democrats, over 80 percent of independents and over two-thirds of Republicans, and 75 percent opposed a data center in their own community. Union members spoke for the work while backing tighter rules, and Michael Starks of Sheet Metal Workers Local 24 said data centers had "blessed me, put me in a position to take care of my family." Jessica Holes, who lives in Franklin Township, told the council "Prevention is what is desperately needed" and questioned approving more of them while the demand already on the system is hard to meet. Nobody from the industry spoke at the hearing.

The pressure is not only from sites inside the city, because data centers in surrounding communities draw on the Columbus water system as well. Columbus is taking bids for a fourth water treatment plant, expected to cost billions of dollars, to meet demand from the data centers and from new housing.