HAMMOND, Ind. — A development agreement for a multibillion-dollar expansion of the Digital Crossroads data-center campus on Lake Michigan has expired after the parties missed a June 30, 2026, milestone deadline, the City of Hammond announced July 1, ending — at least under that contract — what officials once billed as the largest economic-development project in the city’s history.

The four-party deal among the City of Hammond, the Hammond Redevelopment Commission, Decennial Group, and CoreWeave required certain milestones and obligations by June 30 following two prior extensions, the city said. Because those conditions were not met, the agreement expired, and Hammond said no additional extensions of the current agreement will be offered.

Key facts

“While we are disappointed that the project did not move forward under the terms of this agreement, we appreciate the time and effort invested by all parties throughout the process,” Mayor Thomas M. McDermott Jr. said in the July 1 city statement. “The City of Hammond remains committed to attracting transformative economic development opportunities that create jobs, expand our tax base, and strengthen our community.” Hammond still calls the former State Line Energy peninsula one of the Midwest’s premier large-scale sites and said it will keep courting projects.

The Times of Northwest Indiana reported the same day that the bid for a $7 billion, 450,000-square-foot expansion was “officially over” under the expired pact. Ryan Hansen’s Times package said the initial deadline was Dec. 31, 2025; McDermott and the Common Council extended it into early March; and Decennial co-founder David Pavlik had said in December the sides were close on a utility agreement. That March target slipped. The Times also noted McDermott told his “Left of Center” podcast audience in mid-June that it would be “embarrassing” to keep extending and that the agreement would “fall apart.”

A year earlier, the project looked locked in. On June 9, 2025, the Hammond City Council approved the development agreement 8-0. Decennial, which built and owns the existing roughly 105,000-square-foot data center, was to construct and own the new building for CoreWeave, an AI cloud firm already on campus. CoreWeave Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo called the 180-megawatt facility a way to deepen the company’s Northwest Indiana footprint with “cost certainty over the project term.” Pavlik called the unanimous vote a step toward “one of the largest AI infrastructure projects in the United States.”

Even at approval, power and lease paperwork were open risks. The city’s June 2025 release said the project remained contingent on finalizing a NIPSCO power agreement and executing the lease among the parties — the same utility and tenant gates later cited when milestones slipped. Community-impact payments tied to the deal had been pitched as a College Bound scholarship windfall; Times follow-ups earlier put Decennial’s community payments in the tens to low hundreds of millions depending on the package version — figures that evaporate with the expired agreement unless a new deal revives them.

The collapse is a data-center story, not a claim that Hammond’s existing Digital Crossroads hall went dark. CoreWeave’s current presence and Decennial’s standing building are separate from the failed expansion contract. It is also distinct from Amazon Web Services’ New Carlisle / Wheatfield GenCo track covered elsewhere on the BizTech desk: this peg is a lakeshore Hammond peninsula project that lost its municipal development agreement after missed deadlines.

For Northwest Indiana’s broader AI-power fight — NIPSCO rates, GenCo gas plants, and local zoning fights from Burns Harbor to Merrillville — Hammond’s expired deal is a reminder that announced megawatts are not energized megawatts. The site remains marketed. The June 30 contract does not.