A data center is coming to Fort Wayne
A ~700-acre, $2 billion data-center campus — local codename “Project Zodiac” — is operating in southeast Fort Wayne, Indiana. The land was bought by a Delaware shell, “Hatchworks LLC,” for an operator the local filings worked to keep at arm’s length: Google. This story shows what the public record reveals, and teaches you to read it yourself.
Every figure here is checkable.
Each number is read from a cited record and tagged for confidence — [verified] when a document states it, [inference] when we derive it (with the assumption shown), [open] when the record doesn’t say. Where the record is silent, we leave it silent: the opacity is part of the story, not a gap to paper over.
Fort Wayne is the BOSC network’s first out-of-state point — Allen County, Indiana (not Lima’s Allen County, Ohio) — and its first confirmed, operational data center. That makes it the clean comparison case: the same load-not-jobs subsidy shape the network exists to weigh, in a second jurisdiction, told entirely from primary records — recorded deeds, an IDEM air permit, and a contested §401 water-quality certification.
Three chapters, three records, three skills:
- Who is actually building this? — read a parcel assemblage and resolve a quiet operator.
- How much power, and on whose grid? — read a Title V air permit for what it discloses, and what it withholds.
- What does it do to the water? — read a contested §401 certification and put numbers on the runoff.