May be biased, but Friday arrives even better than usual now that you can kick it off with a cup of coffee and our weekly publication.

A couple of footnotes here. First, we're welcoming our new June sponsor, Ashley Vetter Design, a loyal subscriber, business owner, and strong advocate for making NW Ohio a better place. Second, we're introducing a new section you may see every once in a while called "Margin Notes." Margin Notes is a place for thoughts that don't fit neatly into a headline. It's where we'll share observations, lessons, and ideas on business, life, and building something that lasts.

Something interesting is happening in Northwest Ohio. More businesses are growing, more people are building, investing, hiring, and creating opportunities, yet very few places are telling those stories the way they deserve to be told. That's why Toledo Money exists.

We are building more than a newsletter. We're building a gathering place for the people shaping the future of this region. Business owners, executives, investors, professionals, and anyone who believes Northwest Ohio's best days are still ahead. Every week, our goal is simple: deliver the stories, developments, people, and ideas moving money, business, and opportunity across our community.

What makes Toledo Money different is that we're not chasing national headlines or the first to some silly breaking news. We're focused on what is happening right here in our backyard. The projects being built, the businesses creating jobs, the leaders making decisions, and the opportunities most people don't hear about until it's too late.

The momentum around this publication continues to grow, and that's because of readers like you. If you enjoy Toledo Money, do us a favor and forward this newsletter to three people who would appreciate being part of what we're building. Every subscriber helps strengthen the network.

Let's get into this week's edition.

This week’s shoutout goes to Ashley Vetter, a longtime Toledo Money subscriber who always has a kind word to share and a remarkable talent for bringing visual storytelling to life. Be sure to check out her sponsor spotlight in today’s issue. Thank you, Ashley, for everything you do to help make Northwest Ohio a better place.

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The internet has a geography. Most people don't think about it that way, but somewhere right now, a data center, a building full of humming servers in a carefully climate-controlled room, is routing your email, storing your photos, and processing your payments. That building is sitting on land, connected to power lines and gas pipelines, and its location was chosen by someone running a very specific checklist.

Northwest Ohio is starting to check every box.

When Amazon Web Services planted its US East (Ohio) region — officially, US East 2, in the Columbus area over a decade ago, it wasn't a random decision. Central Ohio had flat land, affordable power, fiber backbone, and a growing tech workforce. AWS quietly turned that into one of the most significant cloud infrastructure investments in American history.

The numbers are staggering: AWS has committed more than $23 billion in Ohio through 2030. Governor DeWine announced a $10 billion expansion plan alone. The campuses now span New Albany, Hilliard, Sunbury, Marysville, Sidney, Pickaway County — the geographic footprint keeps growing outward from Columbus like rings on a tree.

Here's what's important to understand about how AWS structures that footprint: every AWS region is divided into Availability Zones — physically separate data center clusters, typically 60 to 100 miles apart, engineered so that if one goes down, the others stay up. US East 2 currently runs three AZs. They are geographically distributed across the Columbus metro and its surrounding counties, giving AWS the redundancy its enterprise customers require. Think catastrophic event on the east coast, you still need to access your bank for money. Hence, the need for a second region.

Now look at a map.

Columbus to Toledo is roughly 130 miles northwest. AWS's existing AZs are fanning outward. Sidney, already an AWS target, is halfway there. The geographic logic of a fourth AZ, anchored in Northwest Ohio, follows the same pattern AWS has used to build out every mature region it operates.

The speculation about AWS isn't the only signal. The market is already speaking.

Meta, Facebook's parent company, is building an $800 million AI-optimized data center in Middleton Township, Wood County. The 715,000-square-foot facility on 280 acres will be Meta's 28th data center globally and is designed specifically for AI workloads. It's not a storage warehouse. It's a compute engine, and they put it here.

In Oregon, Ohio, just east of Toledo along the Lake Erie shoreline, a separate developer is planning a billion-plus dollar facility on 168 acres that could yield $5 million annually in local tax revenue before it's fully built out. The site calls for up to eight buildings, each several hundred thousand square feet.

These aren't coincidences. They are site selection decisions made by teams who ran the same infrastructure checklist Amazon runs. Northwest Ohio passed.

Power is the defining constraint for data centers in 2025. A hyperscale facility can consume 100 to 500 megawatts; enough to power a small city. The national grid, strained and slow to permit new transmission, can't always deliver that reliably. So the smartest operators are going to the gas.

Northwest Ohio sits on top of one of the most robust natural gas pipeline networks in the country. The region is crisscrossed by major transmission lines that give data center operators the ability to generate power on-site; fast, reliable, and independent of grid constraints. This is not a minor amenity. In the current environment, it's a decisive advantage.

The Apollo Power Generation Facility, a proposed 350-megawatt natural gas plant next to the Wood County data center site, tells you exactly what's happening. The power plant isn't serving a neighborhood. It's built to feed the building next to it. Hope Utilities is simultaneously developing a new natural gas pipeline specifically to support data center load, expected commissioned by October 2026.

The infrastructure is being built around the demand. That's a signal.

To understand where Northwest Ohio could be heading, look at what Northern Virginia looked like 20 years ago.

Ashburn, Virginia, known today as Data Center Alley, now hosts over 4,900 megawatts of data center capacity across +155 facilities. Roughly 70% of global internet traffic passes through its buildings daily. It is, without exaggeration, the most important patch of commercial real estate on the internet.

It didn't start that way. Ashburn's dominance was built on a specific combination of factors: proximity to federal government demand, a fiber network that grew out of early internet infrastructure, cheap land in the early days, and a power grid that could scale. One company came. Then another. Then the ecosystem locked in, interconnection, talent, vendors, and the flywheel spun.

Columbus is somewhere in the middle of that maturity curve. More than 50 data centers are already operating in Central Ohio. Four hyperscalers, AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, collectively own over 5,000 acres in the region. The market is real, it's growing, but it hasn't locked in the way Ashburn has. There's still room to move, and AWS is still actively expanding outward.

Northwest Ohio, by that analogy, is early. The land is cheap relative to what Columbus will eventually price. The pipelines are in. The first major tenant, Meta, just signed its name to the region. The question isn't whether this becomes a market. The question is how fast.

There is a difference between "a data center in Northwest Ohio" and "an AWS Availability Zone in Northwest Ohio." The gap between those two things is enormous.

An AZ designation means AWS is treating this geography as critical infrastructure — redundant, enterprise-grade, and baked into the service-level agreements of thousands of businesses running on us-east-2. It means the anchor tenant isn't just a big building; it's a node in the backbone of the commercial internet. Every company that relies on us-east-2 for Ohio-region latency would be partially running through here.

That designation also triggers a second-order effect: the ecosystem follows. Colocation providers. Fiber carriers. Network interconnect facilities. Managed service vendors. Each one adds jobs, tax base, and demand for local commercial real estate and utilities. Cough Cough 🤔 … how can you profit from this datacenter rush?

Columbus didn't plan to become a cloud capital. It had the right ingredients and got the first call. Northwest Ohio has the same ingredients; and the geometry of AWS's own expansion is drawing a line directly toward this region.

None of this is guaranteed. Site selection is competitive, and Ohio is not the only state aggressively courting data center investment. But the evidence on the ground; an $800 million Meta campus in Wood County, a billion-dollar facility taking shape in Oregon, natural gas power plants being filed with state regulators specifically to serve data center load — suggests the region isn't waiting to be discovered.

It's already being built.

The leaders paying attention right now aren't asking whether data centers are coming to Northwest Ohio. They're asking what the region needs to do to make sure the next availability zone, the next hyperscaler campus, the next $2 billion land acquisition lands here instead of one county south or one state over.

Ashburn didn't become Ashburn by accident. But it also didn't become Ashburn by waiting.

The interesting thing about anything, but particularly business, is that the person or company that stays around the longest is often the one that becomes the overnight success. Visibility only happens through two things: marketing and time. Many people overcomplicate business, and don’t get me wrong, if it’s the wrong business, wrong market, etc., it may not work.

However, with the right systems, it’s still not guaranteed to work fast. But the longer you are at it, the more market exposure you have, the more people become familiar with the brand, and the more comfortable they become consuming whatever it is you are offering. Trust and familiarity compound over time in a way that often looks invisible until suddenly it doesn’t.

So, it’s not solely “How great is the idea?” but also, “How long can you exist in the space and be unknown until you have your big breakthrough?”

Here are a few headlines we are snacking on

For Ashley Vetter, design is the deliverable, but the real work is the idea. Ashley partners with businesses and organizations to simplify the complicated, connect the dots, and create thoughtful branding, websites, marketing, and creative campaigns. With more than 20 years of experience and a collaborative approach, she helps clients turn ideas into clear, cohesive solutions that work across all platforms. Below are just a few of the notable projects:

Whether you're launching something new, refreshing an established brand, or simply need a creative partner who can help bring clarity to your next big idea, Ashley is a trusted resource right here in Northwest Ohio.