Indiana EDGE Payroll Tax Credit for Amazon Data Services (New Carlisle Data Center Campus)

Mechanism

Indiana's EDGE (Economic Development for a Growing Economy) credit is a non-refundable, performance-based payroll tax credit awarded against a company's incremental state tax liability, conditioned on job-creation and wage commitments verified annually by IEDC. This award — up to USD 18.3 million — is one of five distinct incentive instruments IEDC stacked for the AWS New Carlisle project (EDGE credit, Hoosier Business Investment credit, redevelopment tax credit, training grant, and road-infrastructure contribution), plus a 50-year sales-tax exemption on data center infrastructure purchases. Three of these companion instruments (the USD 55M Hoosier Business Investment credit, the USD 20M redevelopment tax credit) are separate line items in the GTA/IPTM filing queue and will be filed as distinct actions given they are structurally separate award instruments with their own statutory basis, even though they share the same beneficiary, announcement event, and underlying USD 11 billion investment.

Severity is set at 2 (of 5): a single-state, single-project tax credit is modest relative to national-scale industrial-policy instruments (CHIPS Act, IRA) already in the register, even though the anchor investment (USD 11 billion) is large — the credit itself is the incentive layer under examination here, not the total capex.

Downstream implications

• Adds Indiana to the roster of US states competing for hyperscale AI/cloud

data-center investment via stacked payroll, investment, and property-tax incentives — a pattern also seen in Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia state EDGE-equivalent programs.

• The 50-year sales-tax exemption on data-center equipment is an unusually

long incentive horizon and merits comparison against other US state data-center tax-exemption regimes if a cross-state comparison action is filed later.

• Reinforces the AI-compute buildout as a distinct sub-track of the western

industrial-policy stack, adjacent to but structurally different from semiconductor-fab subsidies (CHIPS Act) — this is downstream compute capacity, not fab capacity.

Open questions

• Exact statutory basis for the 2023-09-01 incentive-agreement effective

date (predates the April 2024 public announcement by ~7 months) is not disclosed in the IEDC press release; likely reflects a confidential pre-announcement agreement execution date.

• Whether the 1,000+ committed jobs are being tracked/verified publicly by

IEDC on an annual clawback basis has not been confirmed.