Meta Expands Ohio Footprint: $679 Million Invested in 1,345-Acre Data Center Campus

Meta has spent $679 million assembling a data center campus outside Columbus, Ohio. Through subsidiary Sidecat LLC, the company has acquired 1,345 acres across 18 parcels in Licking County over eight years, paying an average of $504,000 per acre.

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The 2025 acquisitions show just how aggressive Meta has become. Three new parcels totaling 514 acres cost $566 million, pushing per-acre prices above $1.1 million. For comparison, rural farmland in Licking County typically trades for $10,000-$15,000 per acre.

The Strategy

Meta has been running a different playbook from the headline-grabbing Texas projects. Rather than pursuing massive single acquisitions in remote locations with potential grid constraints, Sidecat assembled contiguous farmland parcels adjacent to existing transmission infrastructure just outside the Columbus metro area.

The timeline tells the story. The first Sidecat purchase came in October 2017—a small 1.3-acre parcel for $170,000. Major acquisitions followed in 2019: 414 acres for $51 million. By 2023, assessed improvements on one 214-acre parcel hit $146 million, signaling construction was well underway.

Meta secured land for six years before utilities started building infrastructure to serve them. Only in December 2023 did AEP Ohio announce its transmission line project, citing "rapid economic development" driven by data center demand. The utility is now building two 13-mile, 345-kilovolt transmission lines specifically to serve data center demand in the area, with construction running through 2027.

And Meta isn't waiting on the grid. Regulators have approved a 200-megawatt natural gas plant to be built directly on the Sidecat campus, with construction targeted for completion in 2026.

What's Next

The 2025 expansion confirms what parcel records have shown for years: Meta is betting big on Ohio. At over $1 million per acre, these aren't speculative land purchases—they're strategic investments in a site where construction is already underway and power solutions are locked in.

Current grid load in the region sits around 500 megawatts; with expectations for grid load to quadruple in the next two years.

How It Compares

We've tracked other major data center land plays—Stargate Initiative's billion-dollar AI infrastructure announcements backed by OpenAI and Oracle, Texas Tech and Fermi’s nuclear-powered HyperGrid campus and Equinix's Georgia expansion. Here's how the acreage stacks up:

The contrast in approach is stark. West Texas sites like Stargate and HyperGrid have grabbed headlines with their scale and nuclear ambitions, but there haven’t been the same pronouncements of utility expansion there, like for Meta’s Ohio project

Meta's Midwest portfolio is smaller but arguably further along—a buildable, infrastructure-adjacent site assembled over nearly a decade, now in its construction phase.

Sources

• Parcel data: Acres.com property records for Licking County, OH; Taylor County, TX; Carson County, TX; Henry County, GA
• Sidecat LLC ownership: Ohio Secretary of State business filings
• AEP Ohio transmission project: Transmission Lines in Delaware and Licking Counties (Dec 2023)
• Natural gas plant approval: PUCO Case 25-0188-EL-BGN, Will-Power OH, LLC (Socrates North Power Generation Facility)
• Transmission infrastructure: HIFLD Electric Transmission Lines dataset
• Stargate Initiative: OpenAI Stargate announcement
• HyperGrid campus: Texas Tech University HyperGrid press release

Data compiled January 2026.