About eight miles north of the sleepy river town of Madison, Indiana, plans are underway to build one of the largest data centers in America.
The center is planned to be built on 549 acres of the former Jefferson Proving Grounds Army base that closed around 1995. The Ford family, who is well-known in Jefferson County, Indiana, owns 3,600 acres that makes up the former base and the Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge above it.
Plans publicly filed with Jefferson County government in the first half of 2026 show a planned scale of 7.1 million square feet spread out across nine buildings. FOCUS spoke to two experts who both said they have seldom heard of a data center that big.
“What we have seen publicly released is that it could be one of the largest data center complexes in America,” Ben Inskeep said, who’s with the group Citizens Action Coalition. Inskeep’s nonprofit has a campaign going to educate Hoosiers about how much electricity data centers need and how it might affect their electric bills.
“Yikes, that’s pretty big,” Andrew Chien said about the announced square footage. Chien is a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago.
For comparison, 7.1 million sq. ft. is the same amount of space as 125 football fields. If the buildings are two stories tall, that’s still 62 football fields.
The Poe Companies and PowerHouse Data Centers project coming to West Louisville, which has garnered much resentment in the community, is 1.5 million square feet.
“I think any place can be a good place for a data center, as long as the city’s government puts into place the protections that it needs for its community,” John Sinclair said, who lives in downtown Madison.
Sinclair was one of hundreds of people who protested this data center at a meeting on May 20. At that meeting, the county Board of Zoning Appeals ruled this development is compliant with the heavy industrial zoning classification that the land already has. As such, construction can begin.
Sinclair said he’s not against all data centers, he just wants to make sure the power grid can support a project of this scale. He also has questions about how much nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide diesel generators on-site will emit.
“Does the infrastructure we have, is it capable of supporting that? Will it raise ratepayer agreements in this time?” Sinclair said.
Dean Ford said at the May meeting that they are working with “a company”, but he cannot elaborate which one. Daniel Ford and his sister Deanna Ford have declined to answer FOCUS’ multiple questions over the last month about what company they might be working with, if they’re in communication with Duke Energy Indiana about energizing the project, or if they can estimate how much power it might need.
Chien said it’s hard to estimate the prospective energy demand of a data center without knowing what kind of data center it will be.
“The most extreme ones are what people are building a lot these days; these AI training data centers,” Chien said. “At the other end of the spectrum you have traditional cloud data centers. And the ratio between them might be as much as 20-1, in terms of power density.”
Chien said if this is a power-dense AI training data center, it’s not unreasonable to think it might need 9 gigawatts (GW) of electricity.
A Duke Energy Indiana spokesperson told FOCUS that it currently has a max generating capacity of 6.8 GW of electricity. A spokesperson for ComEd, the utility in Chicago, said that its customers in Cook County, IL used 42,534 GWh (gigawatt hours) of electricity in 2025. That would equate to 4.85 GW of electricity being supplied to the Chicagoland area every hour on average.
Inskeep is very confident the data center will need at least 1 GW of electricity. That’s because there’s a Meta data center being built in Lebanon, IN that has an announced layout of 4 million square feet, and a power demand of 1 GW.