A New Jersey developer is proposing a billion-dollar AI data center in Monroeville, a Huron County village of roughly 1,300 people. Decimal Digital bought 48 acres in the Fort Monroe Industrial Park in 2025 and is now pitching a 100-megawatt facility called Project Eagle Ridge. The proposal follows problems at a cryptocurrency-mining operation across the street, and the village’s yearlong moratorium on new data center projects, which ends in March, means Decimal Digital must make its case to residents before the project can move forward.
That skepticism is baked into the calendar. Monroeville is one of 18 Ohio municipalities and townships deciding data-center-related measures on the Nov. 3 ballot, according to Ohio Capital Journal. In Monroeville's case, an advisory measure asks voters whether the village should allow new development — a nonbinding gauge of public sentiment that won't change any laws but will tell officials, and Decimal Digital, how the wind is blowing. As News 5 Cleveland reports, Decimal Digital CEO Roshan Shah said he expects the ballot response to be unfavorable, even as his company tries to make its case directly to residents.
A Bitcoin Bust Still Haunts the Industrial Park
The timing is awkward because Monroeville is still untangling the mess left by a troubled cryptocurrency-mining operation sitting directly across the street from Decimal Digital's proposed site, inside the same Fort Monroe Industrial Park. The mining facility is tied to Gray Matter Holdings legal disputes, and the property is now controlled by a court-appointed receiver after the operation left the village and other secured creditors owed $1.3 million, according to officials cited by thecooldown.com. The same outlet reports that village leaders are still juggling persistent noise issues and a receiver-led court process tied to the site.
Decimal Digital is actually a tenant at that same crypto-mining hub and is competing to buy the mining property through the receiver, with hopes of cleaning it up. Shah described the site as an antiquated bitcoin-mining operation with legacy equipment that needs to be replaced, calling it unbearably loud. He has said he wants Project Eagle Ridge to be an architectural masterpiece rather than a cookie-cutter data center — a pointed contrast with the neighbor he's trying to help clear away.
The experience has also affected the village’s approach to electric service. Monroeville rewrote its service agreements to include stronger collateral requirements and other financial protections after the cryptocurrency operation’s collapse, according to the industry trade outlet datacenterknowledge.com.
What Decimal Digital Is Offering
Decimal Digital's pitch is built around money and infrastructure the company says it will fund itself. The proposal includes a developer-funded 69-kilovolt transmission line connecting the project to Herbert Substation, with the upgrades paid for entirely by the company rather than village residents, per the same trade publication. The facility would use a closed-loop liquid-cooling system intended to reduce water consumption, as reported by ETDatacenters, and the campus is designed to support both AI training and inference workloads.
On the financial side, Decimal Digital is requesting a 100% property-tax abatement for the project, but says it would replace that lost revenue with direct payments: at least $500,000 per year to schools and at least $250,000 per year to Monroeville itself, plus a $3 million up-front payment to the village, according to News 5 Cleveland. The company also wants a sales-tax break on construction materials and hopes to work with a port authority on financing, while offering to pay slightly more than the going rate for the electricity it uses, with rider fees flowing into a special fund controlled by Monroeville — which still runs its own electric utility within village boundaries. None of those terms are final; as News 5 Cleveland notes, they remain proposals with no agreement in place.
Grid Costs and Utility Protections
The proposed developer-funded transmission line is specific to Project Eagle Ridge, while broader grid costs are a separate issue. According to WLWT, the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel says PJM is considering $22 billion in regional infrastructure projects driven by concentrated data-center load growth. That systemwide cost-allocation concern does not establish that Decimal Digital’s project would shift costs to Monroeville residents. In a separate Ohio example, NBC4 reported in May 2024 that AEP Ohio proposed a minimum billing demand of at least 90% of contract capacity for data centers. That proposal by an investor-owned utility is not evidence of the terms Monroeville’s municipal utility would set for Decimal Digital.
The conceptual site plan calls for one computing hall and an adjacent on-site power substation, with the 100-megawatt facility capable of supplying power equivalent to roughly 80,000 U.S. households. Decimal Digital projects the finished facility would employ roughly 50 people at an average salary of $80,000, while construction itself would require more than 500 workers.
Residents Split Over Jobs Versus Rural Character
That construction demand has caught the attention of organized labor. Jim Adams, an organizer for IBEW Local 129, a union representing electricians, lives in nearby Norwalk and told News 5 Cleveland he had never seen work like this in his 30 years in the trades. Kenneth Bischoff, meanwhile, offered a more resigned endorsement, saying that if a community is going to get the money, it might as well be Monroeville.
Not everyone agrees. Kevin Stoddard, who works in construction, opposes the proposed data center and argued it should be built in Cleveland or Toledo rather than in the countryside. Monroeville Mayor Joseph Galea declined News 5 Cleveland's interview request ahead of a public open house on the project, leaving Shah to carry the company's message directly. Shah has said Decimal Digital doesn't use nondisclosure agreements and has publicly released presentations on transmission planning, water studies, economic impact, acoustic analysis and engineering consultants, telling datacenterknowledge.com, “We don't believe in NDAs.” He's also said he wants residents to process the information and keep an open mind, even as he anticipates Tuesday's advisory vote may not go his way.
A Statewide Reckoning Over Data Centers
Monroeville's vote lands amid what Ohio Capital Journal describes as fierce pushback against large-scale data centers statewide. Ohio has the fourth-most operational data centers in the country, according to a Pew Research Center analysis published in April cited by Ohio Capital Journal, though The Columbus Dispatch separately describes the state as one of the nation's top five for operating data centers. A Gallup poll in May found more than 70% of Americans oppose data-center construction in their own area, Ohio Capital Journal reports.
Nine other Ohio communities — Conneaut, Defiance, Granville, Oregon, Pataskala, Piqua, Sunbury, Trenton and Upper Sandusky — have petitions mirroring a statewide effort to ban data centers that draw more than 25 megawatts per month, while Grove City has already adopted a 12-month moratorium to study impacts and Urbana considered a charter amendment targeting facilities using more than 7.5 megawatts, according to the Dispatch. In Ashville, EdgeConneX is pursuing an 800-megawatt data center on 195 acres despite a referendum aimed at halting or stalling it, even though the project guarantees Teays Valley Local Schools $77.4 million upfront upon occupancy, the Dispatch reports.
Industry money is flowing hard into these fights. Tech companies and trade groups had donated more than $400,000 to defeat local Ohio data-center ballot measures as of two days before the current reporting, according to cleveland.com. In Oregon, Ohio, opponents of a proposed charter amendment raised $335,000 — including $250,000 from Vantage Data Centers alone — compared with just $4,600 raised by ban supporters, the same outlet reports, in a city of fewer than 20,000 people. Amazon has separately proposed a $2 billion data center in Sunbury, per cleveland.com. NPR reports that many Ohioans are displeased with the state's rapid data-center buildout, a frustration now bleeding into the state's midterm elections.
The financial stakes extend well beyond any one village. Local governments across Ohio have offered additional property-tax incentives for data-center projects potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars statewide, according to the Dayton Daily News. The state's own agreements with Amazon, Google and Meta let those companies build data centers without paying sales tax on building materials, a deal the paper reports is expected to cost billions in foregone revenue over decades the state can't get out of.
For Monroeville, the decision involves a proposed data center in an industrial park where a previous energy-intensive operation left unpaid debts and ongoing disputes. The advisory vote will give officials and Decimal Digital a measure of residents’ views before any final agreement is signed.
