Microsoft will pay for all the generation and transmission needed to serve its La Porte, Indiana data center campus under a 20-year electric service agreement with NiSource announced Oct. 16. Service starts in 2028. The utility's unregulated affiliate, NiSource Ge
Directly depicts the official groundbreaking event for Microsoft's data center campus in La Porte, Indiana.neration Company, will add roughly 1,100 MW to its generation pool to cover the campus.
Microsoft funds the plants and the wires outright. NiSource says that lifts projected savings for existing NIPSCO electric customers to about $1.75 billion over the life of its data center contracts, up from $1.4 billion before this agreement, or as much as $140 per customer a year.
"Affordability is not separate from economic development; it is a key pillar of our GenCo model," said Lloyd Yates, president and chief executive of NiSource.
Microsoft's Jeff Riles said the structure keeps the company's power costs off other ratepayers' bills.
"Microsoft has always been committed to paying our own way and identifying long-term solutions like this one to ensure that our data centers don't increase electricity prices for other ratepayers," said Riles, senior director of energy markets at Microsoft.
A second contract landed the day before. GenCo signed a battery storage tolling agreement on Oct. 15 with Atlas Storage 1 LLC, an indirect subsidiary of AGP Capital Holdings, covering a 600 MW / 2,400 MWh standalone system tied to the MISO transmission system, according to the 8-K filing. Aggregate storage payments are expected to reach about $2.2 billion over a term of roughly 20.5 years, with the first phase due in commercial operation by Dec. 1, 2027.
The Microsoft Azure campus behind those numbers is still being built. Microsoft broke ground at La Porte on June 17, 2026, on 489 acres at Radius Industrial Park, and the program has grown from one 245,000-square-foot building to 17 buildings, the first of them due for completion in early 2029 with closed-loop liquid cooling.
The GenCo structure itself is not new. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved it in September 2025, and NiSource signed a similar long-term agreement with a subsidiary of Alphabet in April. Baxtel counts 146 data centers across Indiana run by 46 providers, the largest of them Google's Zodiac 1 at 100 MW, with 38 of those facilities in the Northwest Indiana market that includes La Porte.
The significance sits in who carries the construction risk. Microsoft is funding 1,100 MW of generation and a 2,400 MWh battery before a single megawatt reaches La Porte 1. That is the price of speed to power in a regulated state, and it is now the template.
What the model cannot fix is timing. Service begins in 2028, the battery contract stays conditional until January 2027, and the customer savings NiSource is promising depend on Microsoft finishing the buildings it has committed to.
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