Licking County, Ohio

County ranked by announced AI data-center load

1.0 GW Announced AI load

Campuses

Lead operator

Key takeaways

Licking County has 180,311 residents, but the New Albany Personal Property Tax district absorbs four campuses (Meta Prometheus, Microsoft Heath/Hebron, Google New Albany, AWS New Albany) totaling over 1 GW of announced load. New Albany itself has only 10,825 residents.Source: Census ACS 2023 B01003 (Licking County, OH) + sources[0] (Wikipedia: New Albany, OH) + data/sites/data_centers.csv
Meta's Prometheus is the world's first announced 1 GW AI data center, a single building scheduled to energize in 2026 on AEP Ohio's grid. Its load alone exceeds the residential demand of any city in Licking County.Source: data/sites/data_centers.csv (Prometheus) + sources[1] (DCPulse: Meta Prometheus)
Property tax assessments rose 12.2% over three years against a median household income of $81,033. The home-price rise of 6.0% is unusually moderate for a county absorbing four hyperscaler builds at once, a sign that most of the tax base growth is industrial rather than residential.Source: data/cache/property_tax_yoy.csv + data/cache/realestate_yoy.csv (FIPS 39089) + Census ACS 2023 B19013
New Albany grew from 414 residents in 1980 to 10,825 in 2020, an explicit master-planned community funded by Limited Brands founder Les Wexner. Intel's separate $20 billion semiconductor fab next door means the same AEP Ohio substation has to land semiconductor and AI campus load in parallel.Source: sources[0] (Wikipedia: New Albany, OH)

Only 89.7% of Licking residents lived in the same county a year earlier, signaling 10.3% turnover. New Albany's master-planned absorption capacity is being tested by construction labor inflow tied to four hyperscaler campuses energizing on overlapping timelines.Source: Census ACS 2023 B07001 (Licking County, OH)
91.9% wired broadband adoption sits between Franklin (93.3%) and Fairfield (91.2%), placing Licking in the middle of the central Ohio cluster despite hosting the largest single AI build in the world.Source: Census ACS 2023 B28002 (Licking County, OH)
Manufacturing employs 11.0% of Licking's workforce, well above Franklin's 7.5%. The Heath and Hebron Microsoft sites are landing in a county whose workforce already includes the kind of plant-operator skill base hyperscaler operations teams hire from.Source: Census ACS 2023 C24050 (Licking County, OH)
Licking has an unemployment rate of just 3.2%, the lowest of any Ohio batch-3 county. The four-campus, 1 GW-plus build is therefore drawing construction labor from a market already at structural full employment.Source: Census ACS 2023 B23025 (Licking County, OH)