In Mt. Orab, a 4,400-person village in Brown County, the mayor and every village council member signed nondisclosure agreements with a developer called DB Stu LLC before residents learned a 1,000-acre data center was coming to their town. In Piqua, a buried Nevada corporate filing eventually traced the developer J5 LLC to Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters — revealed only after the city had already approved $1 billion in tax abatements. In Trenton, a 141-acre, 250-megawatt Prologis campus — bigger than five Walmart Supercenters — was approved by the city planning commission in a 10-minute meeting that allowed no resident questions. In Lordstown, a $3.6 billion data center developer is suing the village in the Ohio Supreme Court for trying to ban them. The pattern is consistent: emergency ordinances, sealed agreements, and zoning votes that move faster than residents can organize.
All 88 Ohio counties, shaded by data center development risk. The darker the county, the more structurally attractive it is to hyperscale developers — based on power availability, water capacity, land availability, and proximity to existing projects.
The eight marked counties have active, approved, or recently-withdrawn projects. Click any county to see its risk score and read the full report.
Volunteers from Ohio Residents for Responsible Development need 413,488 valid signatures from at least half of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1, 2026 to put the data center ban on the November 3, 2026 ballot. Coordination is run by Conserve Ohio — the official site lists petition signing events in every county.
We track every Ohio data center filing — corporate disclosures, council minutes, NDA leaks, ballot deadlines. Sourced from local reporting and primary records. One email when something happens in your county.