Testimony — Ohio Select Committee on Data Centers (2026-06-04)
Witness: Cory Parent, Allen County resident (interested-party testimony)
Source audio: bosc-committee-testimony-2026-06-04.wav (12:17, recorded 2026-06-04)
Transcription: auto-generated, mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo, on-device.
⚠️ Machine transcription — may contain ASR errors (speaker names, the EO number, and technical terms especially). Verify against the audio before quoting. Speaker labels are inferred from content (no diarization); timestamps are
mm:ss.
Prepared statement — [Cory Parent] · 00:23
[00:23] Good afternoon, co-chairs and members of the Select Committee on Data Centers. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Cory Parent. I’m a resident of Allen County and a software and platform engineer who builds cloud infrastructure for regulated industries — including health care, financial services, and commercial real estate, in the past. I work daily with the platforms these facilities are built to serve, and with the economics that govern how their capacity is bought and sold.
[00:49] When you see that these facilities do not employ many people, it is because I exist. I interact with these data centers through software. I request servers and queues — the things to run businesses, via software, not in person.
[01:06] I’m here to make one argument and to make it plainly: Ohio extends substantial public benefits to data center developers without requiring them to disclose who they are. I can speak to this directly. In American Township in Allen County, a data center representing half a billion dollars in capital investment was negotiated for 15 months under an NDA. One of the items that I submitted is, in fact, a petition for writ of mandamus — which is actually what finally got me those records on Friday, or at least a production schedule to produce them.
[01:42] One key thing I haven’t heard today is: what is a data center? No one is asking that question. No one is answering that question. Before we move forward on any legislation, I encourage the committee to encourage the assembly to come up with a centralized definition for a data center — to simplify legislation and understand what we’re getting.
[02:04] Disclosure also matters because nearly everything else discussed today requires it. In my past experience with PropTech, you need to know ownership names to roll up who owns parcels. There’s a reason this is served by companies like Palantir and Reonomy — it’s a complex problem. It need not be. Everyone’s come here with real concerns from different seats, but we all need to do what’s best for Ohio. And while I’ve heard a lot about what the cost of this might be — we need to assess both cost and value, and understand whether that value is going to remain in the state.
[02:54] A key economic dimension to ownership that the public record cannot currently see, and that has not been discussed in the data center debate, is Ohio’s defense footprint. In my work I deal with the difference between commercial cloud and government cloud very frequently. These are not a labeling difference — they are a completely different cost structure, a completely different addressable market. Government cloud capacity runs 20 to 30 percent above commercial rates because of isolation, person-staffing requirements, and compliance overhead. Largely what drives these premiums is authorization level — via FedRAMP and Department of Defense impact levels.
[03:36] The authorization posture also affects the economic impact on the community. I, as a software engineer or a potential entrepreneur — in service of my county’s business people — cannot use that data center if it is a FedRAMP-compliant facility. I think we’ve seen what has happened with the sales-tax exemption. I’ve heard much misinformation today, and it’s ultimately caused by the disclosure issues that we have.
[04:18] When I hear suggestions like “why don’t we use air cooling?” — that’s because a B200 or an H100 graphics card that services these AI workloads must be liquid cooled. It is not a difference between data centers. Hyperscale has been around for 15 years; it’s how I’ve held a job. But we are not understanding the key growth in the actual property held within these data centers and the things they do — and as a result we’re seeing a huge expansion, likely speculative, hoping to get defense contract space on their servers.
[05:08] I’ve included six recommendations in my submission, as well as sources. But I’m not the greatest speaker, and I have about five seconds here. Thank you.
Q&A — national security · Member, then [Cory Parent] · 05:57
[05:57] Member: Thank you, Mr. Parent. It seems you have an interest in the defense space, and I notice your testimony is “interested party” — not necessarily for or against. We’ve had an overwhelming amount of feedback against data centers, but last week the data center coalition said it is a matter of national security — a national security imperative that the United States be an independent developer of the data-services industry. Can you speak to that as it relates to defense contracts or the national scale?
[06:49] Parent (through the chair): I can speculate there. I think you probably understand that most of that is classified. I had a bit more detail in my original [written] testimony on how the authorization levels have changed recently and how they’ve been applied to the industry — and particularly, Google has achieved IL-6, and Google is the developer behind the development in Allen County, which is also host to the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center.
Q&A — why the boom · Member, then [Cory Parent] · 07:37
[07:38] Member: Thank you for your answer. I’m interested in why data centers — why this boom since 2024, especially in Ohio. What does that get us? Why is it necessary now?
[07:57] Parent (through the chair): I do believe some data center growth is necessary. I see this directly as a payer — I’m the responsible party for paying AWS and GCP at my company, and I see the pressure on price; we are definitely running out. Everything is leasing-based, and there are only so many servers at a time. Servers get more expensive during the Super Bowl, because lots of people want to run ads. But I think this proliferation may be specifically related to Executive Order 14265 (verified — signed 2025-04-09; DCPD202500458), which told defense primes to modernize their procurement processes. Practically on the ground that’s technical: Google’s own platform for defense is a secured version of their standard platform — that’s the whole purpose; it matches the “off-the-shelf solutions” language. Google’s data centers use a technology called Kubernetes to do that, and Kubernetes has been employed within, to my understanding, some aerial and ground vehicles — effectively, a “brain in your tank.” It’s the same way a car’s brain has gotten smarter over time. This relates to the term edge: we’ve moved computers to the thing they do. That’s one of my pushbacks on the surveillance argument — you can put a chip on a camera; you don’t need to run that through a data center.
Q&A — layman distillation · Co-Chair Chavez, then [Cory Parent] · 10:32
[10:34] Co-Chair Chavez: You’re very technical and understand this deeply. Can you distill your concern to a layman comment?
[10:49] Parent (to the chair): I’ll do my best. We need two pizzas, and people are trying to get a slice — hundreds and hundreds of people. So there is going to be compute capacity needed; AI is not on the downtrend, AI is very powerful — Opus 4.8 was released on Friday. So everyone is trying to build in hopes of having capacity to sell. Where that puts us, as Ohio, is: we don’t know who we’re selling to, and we don’t know we’re producing the right amount. We’re seeing concurrent demand — a duplication of the same needs across multiple parties. In many ways, the way information flows over networks is very similar to power and water — they are simply networks; they have flow. I deal with rerouting risk and resiliency, just the same. Thank you.
End of witness. (Chair calls the next witness, Kim Georgetown; Carl Setzer on deck.)