Google’s big builds continue

Google is building in two very different places at once. In northwest Ohio, the company has now been confirmed as the developer behind a $500 million data center project near Lima. In southeast India, it is moving from announcement to construction on a far larger campus near Visakhapatnam, with a stated price tag of $15 billion and a planned capacity of 1 gigawatt. The projects sit on different continents. They tell the same story. Google still needs more physical infrastructure, and that means more land, more substations, more backup generators, more cooling equipment, and years of electrical work before a single server does anything useful. (datacenterdynamics.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com) The Ohio project had been moving under the placeholder name “Project BOSC.” That veil is gone now. Local officials in Allen County said on March 16 that Google is the company behind the build in American and Sugar Creek townships, on more than 200 acres north of Lima. The plan includes $50 million for nearby road work and other infrastructure, a 15-year tax abatement, and $250,000 a year for Elida schools. It is expected to create about 50 full-time jobs once built, which is the usual math for a modern data center: huge construction spending up front, modest permanent staffing later. (limaohio.com, datacenterdynamics.com) That gap between construction activity and long-term headcount is why the electrical side matters more than the ribbon-cutting side. The Lima site is still waiting on state permitting for 115 emergency generators, four fire pumps, 36 cooling towers, and 113 fuel tanks. It also already secured a water ordinance for up to 5 million gallons a day. Those details are more revealing than the headline investment number. They show what a data center really is: not a sleek cloud in a press release, but an industrial facility with heavy power and cooling needs that have to be designed, installed, tested, and maintained for years. (limaohio.com, datacenterdynamics.com) Ohio already knows where this leads. The state’s consumer watchdog says hyperscale data centers can use as much electricity as 100,000 homes, and that connecting them often requires new transmission lines and substations. It also notes that data center growth is pushing up electricity demand and can shift grid costs onto everyone else unless regulators change the rules. AEP Ohio has already adopted a tariff that requires new large data centers to pay for most of the power capacity they reserve, even if they do not use it. That is not abstract policy. It is the wiring diagram behind projects like Lima. (occ.ohio.gov) Visakhapatnam makes the same point at a much larger scale. Google said in October 2025 that it would invest about $15 billion in India over five years to build its first AI hub in the country, centered in Vizag. The company described the project as more than a server farm. It includes gigawatt-scale compute, new large-scale energy sources, expanded fiber, and a new international subsea gateway on India’s east coast. This month, Indian business outlets reported that formal construction is set to begin on April 28, with three campuses near Adavivaram, Tarluvada, and Rambilli and a target commissioning date of July 2028. (blog.google, economictimes.indiatimes.com, thehindubusinessline.com) The striking part is not that Google is spending big. It is where the spending lands. In Ohio, it lands in roundabouts, water systems, generator permits, and local electrical infrastructure. In Andhra Pradesh, it lands in 601.4 acres of allotted land, cable landing stations, metro fiber, and power systems sized for a 1-gigawatt cluster. The cloud keeps looking weightless from the outside. On the ground, it arrives as concrete, switchgear, diesel backup, cooling towers, and crews pulling cable across hundreds of acres. (economictimes.indiatimes.com, blog.google, limaohio.com)