In a fast-growing suburb outside Columbus, parents are learning that the power behind the cloud may be coming from their own backyard, just beyond the school fence. A massive fuel cell power plant tied to an Amazon Web Services data center has been cleared near a local school without a direct vote from residents, leaving families furious at how little say they had. The fight in Hilliard, Ohio, has become a test of how far state law and big tech can go in reshaping local neighborhoods over community objections.
At the center of the dispute is a 73-megawatt industrial energy project that would sit next to classrooms and playgrounds, serving a private data center rather than the town’s homes. Parents and city leaders argue they were sidelined by a state-level process that bypassed local zoning and public consent, even as they now scramble to challenge permits and organize opposition. Their anger is not only about what is being built, but about who gets to decide what risks a community must live with.
The quiet rise of a data center town
Hilliard has long marketed itself as a family-friendly corner of central Ohio, an “All-American” suburb where subdivisions back up to parks and school campuses. That image is now colliding with the reality that the town has become a strategic hub for Amazon Web Services, with large data centers rising behind backyard fences. In one widely shared clip, an All-American Hilliard neighborhood is shown ending in a park, while just beyond the fence line sits an Amazon data complex that residents say they never expected to see so close to their homes.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud arm of Amazon, has been expanding its footprint in the region to power everything from streaming video to corporate software. The company’s infrastructure is energy hungry, and the new fuel cell system is designed to provide on-site power to one of these facilities rather than feed the local grid. For many residents, the transformation of Hilliard into a data center corridor was gradual enough to escape broad public debate, until the power plant proposal near a school made the stakes impossible to ignore.
A 73-megawatt plant next to a school
The flashpoint is a proposed 73-megawatt fuel cell installation that would sit on the grounds of an Amazon data center under construction on Scioto Darby Road, close to a local school campus. City documents describe the project as an on-site system meant to provide supplemental power to the facility, not a traditional utility plant serving households. The city’s own appeal notes that the 73-megawatt scale is far beyond what residents expected to see next to classrooms, and it seeks to block the fuel cell system that would support the Amazon data center on Scioto Darby Road…