The project on the record

Six instruments, and not one states a load

That sentence is the whole of this chapter’s difficulty, and it is [verified] by enumeration rather than assumed. The state permits that have issued or been filed for this campus are: construction stormwater coverage 1GC10596*AG, isolated-wetland authorization 251911W, sanitary-sewer PTI DSWPTI-260517, the City’s own road wetland permit 252256W, AES’s adjacent transmission-reroute coverage 1GC11112*AG, and — filed 2026-08-03 — air PTI application P0141118. None of them carries a megawatt field at all.

The absence has been tested rather than presumed. Ohio EPA’s eDocument portal returns zero air-permit documents for Shelby County under any of the three names this campus is filed as, while the same query shape returns nineteen Amazon air-permit documents elsewhere in Ohio — so the zero is a zero and not a broken search. [verified]

Sidney wrote the category, and wrote it wide open

Three months before the campus was zoned, and six before the abatement was signed, the City put data centers into its zoning code for the first time. Ordinance A-3219^rec , adopted 2025-04-28, Exhibit A, glossary of uses:

“Warehouse — Data Center. A facility used for the remote storage, processing, or distribution of large amounts of data that is greater than 50,000 square feet.”

And in the same exhibit’s use table, one letter in one cell: a P — permitted by right — in the Industry / Innovation / Manufacturing column, and nothing in the other eight districts. Both the row and the P are printed in red underline, which the exhibit’s own legend defines as NEW. [verified]

What follows from a P is the point. By-right means no conditional-use permit, no variance, no Board of Zoning Appeals hearing. There is no approval record for this campus’s use to look for, because none was ever required — an absence that is structural, and that this study will not report as a gap in the record.

The only recorded deliberation on why the category was created is a Planning Commission exchange from 2025-03-17, and it is worth reading in full because it is short. A member asked “why the proposed code is specifically calling out data centers when the code currently lists warehouse- small format and large format; noting that a data center should fall under one of those existing uses.” Staff replied that the city was “being inclusive to different types of uses that may or may not come into the city” and that since “a data center stores information” — where warehousing covers “the literal storage of physical goods and materials” — “staff feels the distinction needs to be added.” [verified]

No project is named. Whether the category was drafted with this campus in view is [open], and the chronology is left to speak for itself.

A smaller thing the definition does: it sets a 50,000 square foot floor. A data facility at or below that size is not a “Warehouse – Data Center” under this code, and no other listed use covers it. [open] — what such a building would be permitted as, and where.

The number exists. It is filed, and it is withheld

On 2026-04-24 AES Ohio filed a Construction Service Agreement with Amazon Data Services at FERC — docket ER26-2303-000, accession 20260424-5179, described in the docket as “Construction Service Agreement with Amazon, Sidney OH”. The Commission accepted it on 2026-06-23 (195 FERC ¶61,239). [verified]

The megawatt figure is in that agreement. The unredacted twin of the filing, accession 20260424-5180, carries availCode N — non-public. [verified]

So the campus load is not “undisclosed”. It is disclosed to a federal regulator and withheld from the public record, in a document whose accession number is known. That is a materially sharper [open] than a bare one, and it is the single most answerable ask on this site.

What the study uses instead, and what it costs

With no disclosed load and no disclosed floor area, the screen this network uses elsewhere has no input. The IT load here is bracketed off the one disclosed hard figure — the $3 billion campus investment — against a hyperscale critical-IT construction-cost band of roughly $8.5–20M per MW-IT, an industry norm and [reference], not a Sidney disclosure. That gives 150 MW low, ~353 MW high, ~251 MW central. [inference]

Two errors pull in opposite directions and roughly cancel: $3B spans land, shell and all phases, so the screen runs high; the campus is multi-year, so near-term load runs low. What survives is an order of magnitude, not a figure. Every chapter that consumes it says so, and the moment an air PTI or an interconnection filing names this campus’s MW, it is replaced.

Cooling: one sentence on the whole public record

The cooling design is not disclosed, and this study keeps it unknown rather than choosing an archetype. [open]

What exists is a single line in a City staff presentation heard by Council on 2026-04-27: “All wastewater, including cooling tower discharges, are required to be discharged to the sanitary sewer.” [verified] — the only naming of the mechanism anywhere on the public record, and it comes from the City, not the operator.

Against that, the contracted quantities read the other way. The water agreement reserves a 1.0 MGD peak withdrawal ceiling but projects 4.6 million gallons a year — under 1.3% of the ceiling — of which 1.16M gal/yr returns to the sewer. [verified] A draw that small is consistent with a largely closed-loop or dry design rather than an evaporative tower. [inference]

Neither observation is a disclosure, and they do not agree. The archetype stays unknown, and the water chapter brackets rather than estimates — which is the correct treatment when the operator has stated a quantity and withheld a method.