Company continues to buy up Wood County farmland for data center
Posted By: Toledo Blade on November 24, 2023. For more information, please click here to read the source article.
A company called Liames LLC continued to buy up hundreds of acres of Wood County farmland this month ahead of an expected $750 million data center project on the site.
Property records show Liames has now purchased about 750 acres total in Middleton Township, between Perrysburg and Bowling Green. The Blade reported on an initial purchase of about 279 acres in September. The sale of the remaining parcels closed earlier this month.
In all, the property transactions involved 12 parcels owned by five landowners, and totaled more than $28 million, records show.
The properties are west of I-75, both north and south of State Rt. 582, and east of State Rt. 25. Brian McMahon, owner of commercial real estate firm Danberry National Ltd., who was involved in the sales, did not respond to a request for comment.
Liames was registered in Delaware in 2021, business records show, though little additional public information is available on the company. Wood County Economic Development Commission Executive Director Wade Gottschalk has said the data center will be operated by a Fortune 200 tech company, but has not said which one. Some executives and officials with knowledge of the project have signed nondisclosure agreements.
Liames has been lining up a number of tax-break deals for the project with the county, as well as the Eastwood Local School District Board of Education, and Otsego Local School District, in recent weeks. The Middleton Township trustees adopted a resolution supporting the project.
The project, to employ 50 people, is expected to include several large data center buildings spaced out around the property, with landscaping and water features in between. A site plan has not been made public. The project may not be finished until the early 2030s, officials have said.
“The company hasn’t formally announced, hasn’t decided that they’re going to undertake the project,” a lawyer representing Liames, Chris Knezevic, said in late September. “So there’s some process of doing due diligence, acquiring land — a lot of steps to take — before they can get to the point where they can announce it formally.”
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