Company to expand existing presence at campus outside Chicago
AI cloud firm CoreWeave is to build a 180MW data center in Indiana.
At a city council meeting this week, the City of Hammond unanimously approved a development agreement for a multibillion-dollar data center investment with CoreWeave.
Under the agreement, CoreWeave will expand its current presence at 100 Digital Crossroads Drive with a new facility adjacent to the existing building, built to its specifications.
Decennial Group, which built and owns the existing 105,000 sq ft (9,755 sqm) Digital Crossroad data center, will construct and own the new 450,000 sq ft (37,725 sqm) building on a 25-acre parcel at 301 Digital Crossroads Drive.
During the council meeting, it was suggested that the new building wouldn't start drawing power from the grid until sometime in 2027. The city also noted the project is contingent upon the finalization of a power agreement with local utility NIPSCO and the subsequent execution of the lease agreement between the parties.
During the council meeting, Hammond’s Mayor, Thomas M. McDermott, Jr., said CoreWeave would be signing a 20-year lease on the property. The investment amount for the project is described as “in the billions of dollars.”
“Hammond has proven to be a forward-thinking partner, and we’re excited to deepen our investment here,” said Brian Venturo, co-founder and chief strategy officer of CoreWeave. “We appreciate the city approving the development agreement which will provide CoreWeave with cost certainty over the project term.”
He continued: “This state-of-the-art, 180MW facility will not only enable us to deliver next-generation cloud solutions but also support economic and educational opportunities for the region. We’re proud to help drive innovation and sustainable growth in Northwest Indiana.”
The original data center is built out of an old coal power plant called the State Line Generating Plant. The plant was originally built in 1928 and had a maximum power capacity of 515MW. The site closed in 2012 and was later earmarked as a campus in 2018 as a potential Amazon headquarters location.
The company broke ground on the site in 2018, and construction on the first 6MW phase of the original DX-1 building finished in 2020. That building can support up to 20MW. The site can reportedly support up to 100MW via a dedicated substation.
The company last year was seeking to add another 180,000 sq ft (16,720 sqm) building and 20MW in the second phase, with the company saying the original building was full.
“This pioneering project will be incredibly impactful for our community and the State of Indiana,” said Mayor McDermott, Jr. “The Community Impact Payments the city will be receiving from CoreWeave as part of the Development Agreement will not only help with new city-wide infrastructure and quality of life initiatives, but also will help thousands of students in Hammond go to college, through our College Bound program. It can’t get more impactful than that.”
CoreWeave was originally founded in 2017 as a cryptomining firm, though it later pivoted to offering an AI cloud. At the end of 2024, it had 32 data centers operating more than 250,000 GPUs in total and more than 360MW of active power.
As well as self-building, US data center providers serving CoreWeave include Lincoln, Chirisa, Flexential, TierPoint, Digital Realty, DataBank, Switch, DataBank, Galaxy, Applied Digital, and Core Scientific – with several retrofitting former cryptomine facilities for AI use to serve the GPU cloud firm.
