The New Carlisle Data Center Fight: Amazon, Water, and a Rural Indiana County

At a St. Joseph County Drainage Board meeting this spring, the room filled with farmers who wanted to know one thing: what happens to their water. Amazon had asked permission to pump millions of gallons a day off its construction site near New Carlisle, Indiana, and empty it into a local ditch that runs past their fields. The board had already put the question off more than once. On May 4, 2026, it approved a version of the plan, capped lower than Amazon first asked, with monitors on the ditch and the power to shut the pumping off if the water rises too high.

That meeting is one piece of a larger fight over a data center campus that has become one of the biggest in the country. If you searched "New Carlisle data center" and landed here, this is a plain-English guide to what is being built, who is objecting, and where the decisions stand.

First, the basics for anyone new to this

A data center is a large building, or a group of them, packed with computers that run the internet: websites, apps, streaming, email, and the artificial-intelligence tools that have driven a recent building boom. They run around the clock, which is why they draw enormous amounts of electricity to power the machines and large amounts of water to keep them cool. Towns across the country are fighting them over exactly those two things, plus noise, truck traffic, land use, and worry about who pays for the new power lines.

What is being built near New Carlisle

New Carlisle is a small town in St. Joseph County, in northern Indiana, about 15 miles west of South Bend. The campus rising next to it belongs to Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing arm of Amazon.

Amazon announced an investment of roughly 11 billion dollars in Indiana data centers, its largest in the state, according to the company's own announcement as reported by CNBC. The New Carlisle site, which Amazon calls Project Rainier, spans hundreds of acres of former farmland. CNBC reported the project includes dozens of buildings and that a first phase opened in late October 2025.

This is what the industry calls a "hyperscale" data center. In plain words, hyperscale means one of the very largest kind, built by a single big company for its own use, at a size measured not in one building but in dozens. The scale is the reason a project like this lands so hard on a rural county: it needs power and water on a scale the area has not seen before.

The power question

Electricity is the first flashpoint. Data centers are measured in megawatts and gigawatts, which are units of electrical power. One megawatt is roughly enough to power several hundred homes at once. A gigawatt is a thousand megawatts.

At full build-out the New Carlisle campus is projected to draw about 2.2 gigawatts from the grid, which would make it the largest single customer in the history of its utility, Indiana Michigan Power. Indiana Michigan Power is a subsidiary of American Electric Power. In November 2024 the utility, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the Data Center Coalition, and consumer groups including the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana filed an agreement with Indiana regulators on how such large power users connect to the grid and what they pay toward it.

Asked publicly about who pays for the power infrastructure, Brandon Oyer, an Amazon executive who leads infrastructure for the project, told local station WSBT: "I know that Amazon will continue to pay its fair share for the infrastructure that it needs to run its operations." He described utility rates as "a process that's been established for years, for utilities to charge rates to customers."

The water question

Water has produced the sharpest local disputes, in two forms.

The first is dewatering. When a builder digs foundations below the water table, groundwater seeps in, so the site has to be pumped dry, and that pumped water has to go somewhere. Amazon first asked to discharge 35 million gallons a day into the Niespodziany Ditch, which drains through nearby farmland. Farmers worried about flooding and about the effect on their crops and land. The St. Joseph County Drainage Board tabled the request more than once before approving a reduced figure of 31 million gallons a day on May 4, 2026. Marcel Lebbin, an attorney for the drainage board, said the board concluded "the Niespodziany Ditch can handle the discharge at the rate that AWS is requesting." The approval came with monitoring devices on the ditch and authority for the board to suspend the pumping if levels became a problem. Amazon issued what it called a letter of commitment to engage with affected landowners.

The second is wetlands. In August 2025 the Indiana Department of Environmental Management ordered Amazon to stop work in state waters after construction affected wetlands without the required authorization. The department warned that any violation of its order would be "treated as a willful violation of the Clean Water Act." Amazon later sought permission to permanently fill more than 9 acres of wetlands and reroute more than 5,000 feet of streams to expand the site. The company said at the time that construction had not completely stopped but that contractors were barred from working in the wetlands. Indiana has lost roughly 85 percent of its original wetlands, a fact opponents have cited, and Dan Borrit of the Indiana Wildlife Federation told ABC57 that "the implications of the water usage, the energy usage and the land acquisition have the potential of really significant impacts on our natural environment."

On the operating side, as opposed to construction, Amazon has said its long-term water use will be small. Oyer told WSBT the company does "not expect to withdraw, or use water more than 2% of the year," which he put at about 175 hours annually, and said the site "will withdraw less water than we would have had this land stayed as farmland or agricultural land." He also acknowledged the shared stakes with residents: "The people who live in that region are dependent upon the aquifer and we are dependent upon the aquifer for the operations of our facilities."

Where the decision stands, and who is deciding

Much of the local fight has run through routine government meetings: the drainage board on water, and the county council on land.

At an October 2025 protest before a county council meeting, opponents pressed for the land to stay in agricultural use and questioned corporate assurances about water and power. Randy Figg, a St. Joseph County councilman, said he had received about 85 emails opposing the project, "the highest I've ever received." A rezoning vote, which is the decision to change what the land is legally allowed to be used for, had been postponed and was not on that meeting's agenda. Steve Francis, who helped organize the protest, described the broad concern in plain terms, saying data centers use "millions of gallons of water and a tremendous amount of electricity."

The first phase of the campus is already operating, so the fight now is less about whether the project exists and more about its conditions: how much water it discharges and when, what happens to the wetlands, how its power is supplied and paid for, and how far it expands. Those questions sit with state environmental regulators, the utility commission, and county boards, each on its own timeline.

The bottom line

New Carlisle shows what a very large data center looks like when it arrives in a rural county: not a single up-or-down vote, but a run of separate decisions about water in a ditch, acres of wetland, and power on the grid, argued out in local meetings while the buildings go up. Amazon has made public commitments about its water use and its share of the power costs. Residents, farmers, and conservation groups have pressed on those same points. The record on both sides is being written one meeting at a time.