Life Next to the Hyperscale Meta Data Center in Lebanon, Indiana
Welcome to Lebanon, Indiana! The new home of the 1,500-acre hyperscale Meta data center, Project Domino. We’re exploring Meta’s latest hyperscale AI data center campus in Indiana to help people understand the reality of these projects.
What’s life like next to the Meta data center in Lebanon, Indiana?
Just a 4.5 hour drive south of Solon Township, Project Domino broke ground in February 2026. There is a potential for up to six phases of construction, and according to the water agreement with the city, they will be at peak capacity by 2031 after 5 years of construction.
Meta got the ball rolling for this project under a shell company named Orla LLC. The owner/applicant listed on official documents is Pamela Gregorski, the same representative named on the NDA terminations that Cedar Springs Manager Darla Falcon and Solon Township Supervisor Robert Ellick signed in 2024 and 2025.
With Meta investing over $4 billion into Project Domino, this is no small initiative!
15 total buildings of various sizes are planned:
- 12 data center buildings
- 3 additional buildings for network, logistics, and administration
- 4.8 million combined square footage
The buildings are being constructed next to wetlands with only 300ft setbacks, as shown in the below site plan.
Water and Electricity Usage of the Meta Data Center in Lebanon, Indiana
With the peak projection of 8,000,000 gallons of water to be used daily in the final phase, you are probably thinking – WOW – this campus must also use a lot of electricity! You would be correct.
Upon completion, Project Domino will use somewhere between 1 Gigawatt – 1.7 Gigawatts of power to operate. That’s about the same amount of power as 700,000 – 1,275,000 homes.
What does it look like When Meta Comes to Town? We’re diving into all the details of Project Domino’s water usage, power usage, the realities of construction and more below.
Water Usage of Meta’s Hyperscale Data Center in Indiana
How much water does a 1,500 acre data center use?
Lebanon, Indiana’s Project Domino water usage will expand in 3 tiers over 4 years:
- The first tier of water usage will be an average of 250,000 – 500,000 gallons per day in 2027.
- Peak rates in 2031 reach 8,000,000 GPD.
Lebanon’s current municipal utility water treatment and distribution system has a maximum supply of 4.6 million gallons of water per day (MGD). The existing water system will be expanded in phases to provide a supply of up to an additional 25 MGD (yes, 25,000,000 gallons) of water.
According to the water agreement, the developer will be taxed to pay for the approximately $350 million needed to expand the water infrastructure so the cost doesn’t fall to residents. The total budget for the city of Lebanon in 2024 was $31,402,532.
Does a $350 million infrastructure update to a town of about 18,000 people sound like responsible economic development, despite who is paying for the initial investment?
Additionally, the city will be responsible for bearing the ENTIRE cost associated with the maintenance and upkeep of the $350 million infrastructure updates. Who will be paying for that in years to come?
The city of Lebanon has also agreed to grant Meta very high priority for water resources so their servers can function 24/7.
“The nature of the operation of the Project requires continuous and uninterrupted Water and Wastewater services,” states the agreement. It goes on to say that services affecting public health, welfare and safety, including hospitals and fire protection will get priority, but residential water supplies are not listed as receiving any priority or protection.
Tax Abatements for Meta Data Centers
In fall of 2024, the Lebanon City Council approved a 10 year, 50% property tax abatement and a 35 year, 100% personal property tax abatement for Project Domino to help lure Meta to Lebanon’s new LEAP Innovation District. To offset the tax breaks, Meta will reportedly pay a $1.5 million yearly community impact payment.
Does a $1.5 million yearly payment seem like a reasonable compromise when one party will receive a cumulative hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks? Who is getting the better deal?
Meta is supposed to create 300 onsite long-term jobs to qualify for these breaks. We saw with the Switch data center in Grand Rapids that these promises are rarely kept and even less frequently enforced.
Switch promised to create over 1,000 jobs to be eligible for the breaks they received. The most recently reported number of full-time positions held at the Switch Data Center is 22.
Do we think big tech companies have a good enough track record in keeping their promises to be eligible for these enormous tax discounts?
How Long Does Data Center Construction Take?
Ground broke for the 1,500 acre data center in Lebanon, Indiana in February of this year. A resident that lives adjacent to the data center stated in regards to the construction:
“You could probably cover 100 football fields with the number of lights that they have out here for this project…Between the noise and the lights and the constant helicopter sound, there is no sleep…My husband and I stood outside the other night, and when you were trying to find stars over on the eastern side, there’s nothing. It’s all light.”
Meta is supposed to comply with International Dark Sky Association goals by minimizing light pollution upon completion of the project, but there was nothing in agreements that addressed lighting during construction.
There will be 5 phases of construction for the 15 planned buildings. Meta is waiting for the state to expand the nearby two-lane roads into 4 lanes before they proceed to the next phase.
Years of around-the-clock construction causes extensive damage to existing roads. Is this caliber of construction and infrastructure damage reasonable for residents to live with for years?
Data Center Building Height
In approximately 5 years when the planned construction on Project Domino is complete, the buildings on the campus will reach over 41’ tall. The requirement for residential perimeter berms is 10-12’ tall.
What do you think about a project of this scale being next to residential areas?
The full building elevation renderings document can be found here.
The full landscaping rendering document can be found here.
Parking Requirements for the Meta Data Center in Lebanon, Indiana
A normal industrial campus with buildings equal to 4.8 million square feet would need between 4,800-9,600+ parking spaces to accommodate operations and employees.
Meta’s Indiana Project Domino campus will have a TOTAL of 467 parking spaces.
In the proposed Solon Township data center ordinance, the Township suggests that data centers shall provide a minimum of 1 off-street parking space for each employee of the data center, or 1 space per 100,000 square feet of building area. That could mean only 10 parking spaces would be required for 1 million square feet of building.
The attached graphic is the real parking requirement for Project Domino, submitted by Meta to the city of Lebanon for approval.
Do these parking space numbers above give you confidence that hyperscale data centers provide many local jobs?
Electrical Usage of a Meta Hyperscale Data Center
Project Domino in Indiana is expected to use between 1 GW – 1.7 GW of power once it is fully operational. That’s approximately the equivalent of 700,000 – 1,275,000 homes. The entire city of Lebanon currently has about 7,500 homes.
The Lebanon data center will have one large electrical substation with approximately 7 supplemental ones connecting throughout the campus of buildings (substations are highlighted in red in the below site plan image).
In addition to the substations, there will be overhead power lines and a multitude of generators on campus. It is unclear what kind of generators will be used, but they do have a generator spill containment area on the site plan.
Consumers Energy Signs a Deal with a Hyperscale Data Center Project in Solon Township, Michigan
From FOIA documents, we know that last summer Consumers Energy inked a 1 GW deal with the developer for the Solon Township data center project.
Without strict regulations in place in our township’s data center zoning ordinance, Solon Township is primed to become the next Lebanon, Indiana. This is what our dedicated group of volunteers is working hard to prevent!
How to Prevent Data Centers in West Michigan
How can you help prevent the hyperscale AI data center in Solon Township?
- Continue showing up to meetings
- Share your concerns by making a public comment
- Contact township and state representatives
- Ask The Right Place to stop promoting our area for data centers
- Stay informed and share information with others
There’s strength in numbers!
When Meta Data Centers Come to Town
Thank you for reading our article on what it looks like When Meta Comes to Town! We sure learned a lot about what it looks like when a hyperscale Meta data center comes to town and we hope you did too.
For more information about data centers and what our group is doing to protect Solon Township, visit the What Can I Do? tab on our website.