Hammond council approves multibillion-dollar data center project
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Rendering of proposed data center project in Hammond. AI company CoreWeave would operate the center while Decennial would build the billion dollar facility. (Renderings provided)
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Rendering of proposed data center project in Hammond. AI company CoreWeave would operate the center while Decennial would build the billion dollar facility. (Renderings provided)
Calling it the biggest development project in city history, the Hammond Common Council on Monday approved a development agreement for a major data center project on the city’s lakefront.
Chicago-based developer Decennial is planning to spend well over a billion dollars to expand its operations at the Digital Crossroads data center campus. Decennial will build a 450,000 square-foot data center at the site, which it will lease to AI cloud-based computing firm CoreWeave for 20 years.
A development agreement between the parties estimates Decennial will spend $1.2 billion in building a new data center for CoreWeave. That goes along with thousands of expected construction jobs, but only 35-90 full-time positions once the data center is complete.
A development agreement approved by Hammond’s council gives CoreWeave a 100% tax deduction on its technology and equipment for 20 years. In exchange, Mayor Tom McDermott said the firm will give the city up to $4 million a year over that same 20-year span.
“This is the largest project we’ve ever worked on in the city of Hammond,” McDermott told council members during Monday’s meeting. “That’s an incredible impact for the city of Hammond. We’ve been talking about permanently funding our scholarship program; this is the permanent funding source if we can get everything done with this.”
The council approved the deal with CoreWeave, as well as a 10-year abatement for Decennial, with no votes opposed. The project is set to break ground as soon as Decennial and CoreWeave hash out agreements with Northern Indiana Public Service Co. (NIPSCO) to secure enough energy to power the data center.
Council members peppered McDermott with questions about whether NIPSCO could handle the massive energy load CoreWeave represents. McDermott said he can’t speak to NIPSCO’s operations, but said providing enough power is the biggest hurdle remaining for the project to get underway.
CoreWeave is based in Livingston, New Jersey, and operates 33 data centers across the U.S. and Europe. The company already has a presence in Hammond’s Digital Crossroads campus—a 77 acre site on the lakefront that opened in 2021. Decennial is also heavily involved in the campus and purchased the first building on the site as well as additional land for future data center expansion.
Decennial’s co-founder, David Pavlik, said the city has been great to work with.
“It’s a really important site. It sits on some of the densest, fastest fiber in the United States, which we made an investment to put in,” Pavlik said. “The mayor shook our hand and said, ‘I’ll stick with you if you’ll stick with us in Hammond.’ And you’ve been a phenomenal partner.”
Decennial hopes to finish construction by the end of 2028. The Development agreements also includes a provision stating Decennial and CoreWeave will pay a 15% fee to Hammond of what their taxes would have been under the abatement agreement.