The article is published as part of an exclusive content-sharing agreement with neo-trans.blog.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, the International Exhibition (I-X) Center next to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport will become a data center. And, according to one of those sources, the end user is likely to be Amazon Web Services.
The 1.5 million square feet of available space at the 2.2 million-square-foot I-X Center and the presence of a 25-megawatt (MW) electrical substation on site combined to offer assets that the provider of a new data center couldn’t afford to pass up. For comparison, a 1-million-square-foot data center could use anywhere from 20 to 100 MW of power, according to Data Center Knowledge.
City of Cleveland officials said the new end user of a majority of the city-owned I-X Center was a Fortune 100 company that would bring up to 250 jobs. That’s a small amount of jobs for such a large amount of square feet. But even data centers don’t directly employ that many people. They do support additional jobs, however.
For example, two new Amazon data center buildings in Marysville, a suburb of Columbus, will each be 500,000 square feet or 1 million total and cost $1 billion. They will directly employ 25 people. It is part of a $7.8 billion expansion by Amazon in new data centers in Ohio that are projected to add 230 direct jobs and 1,000 support jobs.
Amazon has reportedly been scouring Northeast Ohio for locations to establish one or more data centers, one of the sources said. Amazon is a Fortune 100 company — one of the top-100 largest firms by revenue in the USA.
Cleveland’s Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund (SRF) Managing Director Brad Whitehead told NEOtrans they’ve resisted selling land from their growing inventory of properties to firms like Amazon which are seeking to build data centers because they consume so much space and electricity while generating so few jobs. He was not contacted for information regarding the I-X Center.
Both sources said the number of jobs resulting from the I-X Center being repurposed as a data center would be comparable to the number of jobs currently at the site that has been working trade shows and events hosted by the former World War Two B-29 bomber manufacturing plant. The I-X Center later was used to build military tanks.
Park Corp. acquired the huge building in 1985 and converted it to exhibition space. The I-X Center once boasted one of the top-10 largest exhibition centers in the world.
Conversion of the most of the site to a data center means the end of the I-X Center hosting the likes of the Auto, Home & Garden, Boat, RV and Holiday shows. But the I-X Center today has only 400,000 square feet available to host shows, with 700,000 square feet leased to Gojo Industries for warehousing.
If these events are to remain in Cleveland, the only facility in the area large enough to accommodate them is the Huntington Convention Center in Downtown Cleveland. The newly expanded center has 550,000 square feet of event and meeting space. This includes 225,000 square feet of exhibit hall space, plus two large ballrooms and meeting rooms.
Ohio Industrial Realty Group LLC in 2021 purchased the stock of I-X Center Corp. from Park Corp. Park leased the property from the city of Cleveland. City Council yesterday voted to extend that lease, originally due to expire in 2039, by another 49 years.
The reason for the extension is that the new tenant is making a big investment in the site and needs to get a return on that investment, city officials said. However, the city can terminate the lease after 10 years if the city needs the land for an expansion of the airport.
Meanwhile, city and county officials are vying to keep the Cleveland Browns’ home football games downtown, along with concerts, shows and other events hosted by the various sports and entertainment venues downtown. The I-X Center is 1.5 miles from where the Haslam Sports Group intends to build a new enclosed stadium in suburban Brook Park.
The proposed Brook Park stadium lacks the floor space to compete for the shows that the I-X Center has hosted. So the relocation of the I-X Center’s shows to downtown could help ease downtown’s pain if the Browns, national sports competitions, major concerts and other events leave downtown for Brook Park.
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