Another data center has been proposed in New Castle County. This one is less than a mile from Newark's Main Street.
A proposed data center on Ogletown Road right outside of city limits was entered into the county's land use application process. It would be behind the existing IFF chemical plant that welcomes people into Newark, less than a mile from the start of Main Street.
Engineering, environmental science and consulting firm Verdantas applied for the project. County Land Use General Manager Dave Culver confirmed that this is a data center in an interview and is asking Verdantas for further clarity in future application filings.
Delaware Online/The News Journal reached out to Verdantas' Wilmington office and has not heard back.
Verdantas' own exploratory plan and traffic study, both publicly accessible on New Castle County's website, calls the project a data center. The site has more than 400,000 square feet of office space. Early filings of the plans show the site having more than 847,000 square feet of data center in the area.
The area is already zoned for this kind of use, and the proposal is still in the very early days of the approval process.
Opening a data center in Newark has proven to be difficult. In 2014, the University of Delaware was planning to build one on the Science, Technology and Advanced Research Campus, a satellite campus that expanded the hometown university's footprint in the city. The approval process took a long time, and the plan faced fierce opposition from local residents.
UD ended up shelving the project, saying it was "not a good fit for the STAR campus."
Now, 10 years later, another one could be coming. Verdantas submitted paperwork on Dec. 2, spending $2,400 to do so.
Culver said developers are building flexibility into the plans. There have been only pre-application meetings so far, and it could take about a year to get this project through the approval process.
Another confirmed data center applied for in New Castle County is the controversial Project Washington, a massive 6-million-square-foot data center planned near Delaware City that is chugging through the approval process. One part of it needs a rezoning, which requires a County Council vote.
Data center project in Delaware City still a long way from reality
This new project near Newark has a key difference from the Delaware City-area one. The area is already occupied with office buildings and is not open space.
"It's a developed area in the city of Newark," Culver said about the location of the new plans.
Regulations on data centers, and which projects those regulations apply to, are in the works by the County Council but have been punted to January 2026.
Data centers and Delaware
Data centers are popping up all over the country as the artificial intelligence industry grows. They require large amounts of energy to run and water to keep cool. In some places, like Chandler, Arizona, residents successfully rallied against an AI data center over water concerns.
Culver said he visited Loudon County, Virginia, where data centers are being built at a much faster pace than in Delaware. He said he learned that data centers for a quickly growing AI industry need 10 times more water than credit card processing.
Utility costs are on the rise in Delaware, which already imports the majority of its energy from a larger regional grid. Data centers need to have land, water and fiber capacity, Culver said. Despite these concerns, he thinks the process to get major construction like this approved is different in New Castle County.
"Our process here is in fact easier than in other states," he said.
He wants to balance environmental and economic issues when the Land Use Department looks at a project. There should also be an adaptive reuse for the property if the technology becomes irrelevant.
The newly applied-for project near Newark already has the correct zoning, and it would be combining land parcels into two for the project. The project has no timeline, but Culver encourages the public to give the Land Use Department a call if they have questions at 302-395-5400.
Shane Brennan covers Wilmington and other Delaware issues. Reach out with ideas, tips or feedback about reassessment and property taxes at [email protected].
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