Five Megaprojects Reshaping the Midwest

The Midwest hosts several large-scale projects that are contributing to the country’s next-generation digital and manufacturing strategy.

Together, these five projects illustrate the region’s pivot from heavy industry to high-tech dominance:

• Representing a total investment of $7.3 billion, Microsoft’s Fairwater AI data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, is slated to go online in early 2026. Often described by Microsoft as the most powerful AI data center in the world, Fairwater is designed to house hundreds of thousands of advanced Nvidia GPUs, providing the immense computational power required for next-generation medicine and climate science breakthroughs.
• Meta has committed $10 billion to its Lebanon data center campus in Indiana. Following groundbreaking in February 2026, the 1,500-acre project has entered an intensive construction phase, aiming to deliver 1 gigawatt of power capacity. It is expected to go online starting toward the end of 2027 or in early 2028.
• Google is advancing its $10 billion Project Mica in Kansas City, Missouri. This 500-acre hyperscale campus is contributing to a nearly 10% increase in local construction employment as crews work toward completing five planned data centers by the end of the year.
• The Stargate initiative, a $500 billion private-sector partnership between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and other funders and technology partners, has planted a significant portion of its 7-gigawatt AI supercomputing network in the Heartland. Key sites include a $15 billion Lighthouse data center campus in Port Washington, Wisconsin, and a multibillion-dollar project in southern Michigan scheduled for a 2026 groundbreaking.
  
  However, in response to the construction in Port Washington, city voters passed a referendum— with 66% of the vote—restricting city government from awarding tax incentives for other large development projects without voter approval, which may stymie further data center construction, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.
• Intel’s Ohio One semiconductor project in Licking County is the largest private-sector investment in state history, coming in at $28 billion. Construction of the first factory, Fab 1, is due for completion in 2030.