Wylie Capital Data Center, Merrillville, Indiana

Wylie Capital, a Chicago real estate firm, wants to turn the Merrillville Commerce Center, at Broadway, 93rd Avenue and Georgia Street in Merrillville, Lake County, Indiana, into a data center campus of up to six buildings. The $600 million, 1.2 million square foot plan calls for buildings up to three stories, two of them in a first phase, and could employ up to 200 people. Merrillville's data center advisory committee gave it preliminary approval in November 2024, but on May 26, 2026 the town council voted to pause all data center projects instead.

The council's moratorium, adopted unanimously on a motion from councilman Shawn Pettit, runs from June 1, 2026 to May 31, 2027 so the town can study what a data center would do to infrastructure, utilities, traffic, noise, tax revenue and neighborhoods. In July 2026 the council voted unanimously to extend the moratorium by six months, to January 1, 2028. Four developers, including Wylie Capital, Province Group and Karis Critical, had approached Merrillville with data center proposals, and one had advanced further than the others. Council President Rick Bella pointed to the neighboring city of Hobart, where officials have clashed with residents over a data center's environmental and traffic impacts, as a reason to wait and learn first.

Residents split at the podium. Jennifer Gross handed out what she said were Harvard University studies on the effects of data centers and urged neighbors to "open their eyes" to the industry's impact on towns. An informal poll of a Merrillville Facebook group found 280 people against a data center, 11 for and eight undecided. Another resident said no one objected when factories and warehouses went up elsewhere in Lake County and argued the town should "rethink this and rethink about taking opportunity when opportunity comes knocking."

The Northwest Indiana Forum held an information session for residents at the Dean and Barbara White Community Center on June 11, 2026, with expert speakers and question sessions. Pettit, who proposed the moratorium, said he favors the tax revenue a data center would bring but that the decision rests with residents: "If they don't want it, they don't want it... We just need to listen to residents." The moratorium now runs through January 1, 2028.