LEBANON — With a $7.5 billion “AI factory” now proposed inside the city of Frankfort, the head of the Boone County Chamber of Commerce says his county’s experience with a similar project offers both a preview and a caution: weigh the whole package, then expect a long construction season.
Sean Reaves, executive director of the Boone County Chamber of Commerce, joined WILO and Boone’s Best 102.7 FM’s “Party Line” on Monday for a wide-ranging conversation on the county’s industrial boom, its effects on small businesses and schools, and a countywide job fair set for October.
The Meta project, from a county that already said yes
Boone County’s data center is being built by Meta, which broke ground on a $10 billion campus in Lebanon’s LEAP Research and Innovation District — a project state, city and Boone County Economic Development Corporation officials formally commemorated in February. The Lebanon Planning Commission cleared the way for the campus, then known in city documents as the “Domino Project,” in 2025.
“That’ll bring one of the largest data centers in America to Boone County,” Reaves said. “We’re excited about that. If you’re going to have one, let’s have a big one.”
Reaves said the initial reports point to more than 300 jobs at the completed campus — figures consistent with Meta’s own project materials, which cite 300 operational jobs and more than 4,000 skilled trade workers on site at peak construction.
“Typically with some of the data centers you’re hearing like 50 jobs, so a lot more folks being hired, and these are jobs that are above the average wage in Boone County,” he said. “These would be what we’d call move-the-needle jobs.”
Reaves was direct about the debate surrounding such projects. “There’s lots of debate around data centers. We totally understand that, and we think debate’s good. It’s America,” he said. He pointed listeners toward a Bipartisan Policy Center report on data center development as a checklist for communities weighing a proposal. The report, built from roundtables and interviews with more than 150 participants nationally between February and June, groups its findings into five key considerations: transparency and communication, power and water, quality of life, land use and environmental impacts, and economic development: (https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/key-considerations-for-data-center-development/)).
“If you have one that’s being proposed in your area, there are different things to look for, from energy consumption to water consumption to land,” he said.
To put scale in perspective, Reaves recounted meeting a chamber counterpart from Loudoun County, Virginia, at a conference in New Orleans this summer. “They have over 200 data centers in one county,” he said. “So if you’re going to have one, I’d rather have it be someone like Meta who is invested in our community to the tune of billions of dollars.”
Three big projects at once
Asked what happens when construction ends, Reaves said Boone County is not facing a single cliff but three overlapping timelines.
Eli Lilly’s 18 Billion Dollar Boone County LEAP investment, he said, is best understood as two separate efforts: the LP1 and LP2 manufacturing facilities in one part of the county, and the Lilly Medicine Foundry going in across from the Meta campus. Lilly broke ground on the Medicine Foundry along State Road 32 West in 2025 (https://lebanon.in.gov/2025/05/06/ground-broken-on-lilly-foundry-within-leap-district/)), a facility the company describes as combining research, process development and manufacturing on one site.
In May, Lilly opened Lilly Lebanon Advanced Therapies, its first dedicated genetic medicine manufacturing plant, and announced an additional $4.5 billion investment in the district.
Reaves said LP2 is expected to begin producing medicine later this year, while LP1 is on a timeline closer to 2027.
He said he considers the current pause in new announcements healthy. “I’d love to see one of these get wrapped up,” he said. “Do I think this will be the end? No. Obviously the IEDC came in and bought that land for a reason.” He expects future construction counts to run closer to two or three thousand workers than the five to seven thousand on the roads now.
The Boone County EDC, he added, is screening for a specific kind of tenant. “These are not looking for just your average warehouse. They’re looking for tech, they’re looking for pharma, high end,” he said, noting the buildings carry strict design specs. “I think they’ll be something that people can be proud of that it’s in their community.”
Growth beyond Lebanon
Reaves pushed back gently on framing the county’s growth as a Lebanon story, and said the chamber has started rotating its bimonthly board meeting through different communities to hear directly from each.
In Whitestown, he pointed to a new pharmaceutical investment tied to Bristol Myers Squibb. RayzeBio, a Bristol Myers Squibb company, is investing more than $173 million in central Indiana and building a 450,000-square-foot facility in Whitestown.
Jamestown, by contrast, told him it is content. At a recent board meeting there, Reaves said he asked the town clerk what the community was missing. “She was almost like, nothing. We’re good,” he said. “They’re really happy with their size, and they made that clear.” The town has a large-scale employer producing automotive parts for Subaru vehicles — one of several Subaru-related operations in the county — and some new homes coming online, but little appetite for major development.
“Lots and lots of companies are contacting Boone County about coming here,” Reaves said. “It’s just pairing the growth” with what each town actually wants.
Small business: ‘There’s good and there’s challenges’
Reaves said the clearest local benefit has shown up on Main Street. He described meeting married couples among the traveling construction workforce who expect to be in the county three or four years.
“They were talking about how they only will shop locally, they eat locally, they tip big because they know how hard our service folks are working over here,” he said. “These are the stories you want to hear — where they’re putting money back into our community at a time when times are tough. We all know affordability is really challenging right now.”
He was candid about the tradeoffs. “The roads — we have a lot of people on the road right now,” he said. “We’d just have to maybe be a little patient. But at the same time, when you’re that restaurant owner and you’ve had a rough couple of years and now you’re filled, that’s good for you. We see both sides of it.”
The chamber has also fielded the question of whether the boom draws new entrepreneurs. Party Line host Russ Kaspar said he spoke recently with a woman who opened a bakery and lunch spot in Boone County specifically because of the activity there.
Schools remodeling to keep pace
Asked what the influx means for classrooms, Reaves said enrollment growth is real but spread across more options than it once was.
“I think the schools are seeing growth, absolutely, but there’s also a diversity of product out there,” he said, citing school choice. “In Lebanon, almost every school has had some sort of remodel, refresh, expansion. I think last year on the first day of school we had six different either ribbon cuttings on projects that were finished or groundbreakings on projects that were new.”
He credited Lebanon Superintendent Dr. Millen with keeping facilities modern, said Zionsville is “in the same boat,” and noted Western Boone has held steady or lost a small amount of school population because of annexations. “I have not heard anything saying, oh, we can’t handle the growth,” he said.
Job Fair+ set for Oct. 8
The chamber’s next major event is a countywide job fair on Thursday, Oct. 8, at the Boone County Fairgrounds, running 2:30 to 5 p.m. at the Witham Pavilion. The chamber bills its Job Fair+ as connecting employers, nonprofits and resource providers with job seekers.
Reaves said he expects roughly 25 to 30 employers, “everybody from Eli Lilly to GXO, every position from office-based positions to warehouse.”
Pre-registration is encouraged, both for planning and because it gives attendees the option to share their information with every participating employer afterward. “If for some reason you weren’t able to get to one booth because we were having a really great conversation, you can opt in for us to share your information with them so they can email you about future job opportunities,” he said.
Other upcoming chamber events include a Women in Business networking session at a local golf club — open to male allies as well — and a fraud and scam briefing sponsored by Star Bank at 7:30 a.m. Thursday, hosted at the Boone EDC. The chamber is also promoting the Pella Window and Door Homearama chamber day through the Builders Association of Greater Indianapolis, and the community calendar includes the Festival of the Turning Leaves in Thorntown.
On the fraud session, Reaves said business owners are as exposed as individuals. “A lot of our healthcare partners are being attacked. They try to shut their systems down and ransom them,” he said. His advice: know the email voice of your regular contacts. “If it just doesn’t sound right, then it’s probably not right.”
He described receiving a bid attachment from a member construction company he wasn’t expecting. Rather than open it, he started a fresh email thread to verify. “Sure enough, the attachment was a hacking scheme of some sort,” he said. The chamber routes anything questionable to its third-party IT provider.
Registration for chamber events is available at boonechamber.org. Reaves can be reached at sean@boonechamber.org.
The Frankfort question
Reaves’ comments arrive as Clinton County residents weigh a proposal of their own. DataOne, a data center developer with operations in the United States and France, is asking the City of Frankfort to approve an “AI factory” campus at the Logix Innovation Campus, a project the company values at $7.5 billion. (https://clintoncountydailynews.com/dataone-seeks-frankfort-approval-for-7-5-billion-ai-factory/)).
The scaled-back city proposal follows Clinton County commissioners’ unanimous January vote denying the rezoning of roughly 715 acres for an earlier version of the project.
DataOne is holding two walk-in open houses for residents at the 51 West Event Center on Clinton Street in Frankfort —
- Monday from 5 to 8 p.m. and
- Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Party Line will devote Tuesday’s full program to the proposal, with representatives from DataOne joining Russ Kaspar to take listener calls at 659-3338. Questions may also be submitted to newsroom@kasparradio.com.
“Not all of us are for it. Not all of us are against it,” Party Line host Cindy Loveless said. “We just want to hear from you.”
As for what a few years of heavy construction does to a place, Loveless offered her own comparison: “Every time you roll in, it’s growing and different, and there’s more things coming.”
Reaves’ summary of the biggest question he fields was simpler. “People will say, well, what’s going on with that? I’ll be like, it’s being built.”