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2020–2026
The ground east of town, in Olive Township, became an industrial frontier. The county established the Indiana Enterprise Center, an industrial growth area east of New Carlisle — the ground examined in the 2020 documentary film Prime Farmland. In April 2024 Amazon Web Services announced an $11 billion campus there ("Project Rainier"), east of the town and partially operational while still building; the New York Times of 24 June 2025 called it the company's largest data center. By 23 July 2026, WNDU reported, AWS had invested $13.8 billion, with roughly eighteen buildings operating on the way to about thirty, and more than a thousand people hired; the campus trains and serves Anthropic's models. The battery plant beside it ran a harder course: a General Motors and Samsung SDI joint venture announced in April 2023 and finalized on 28 August 2024 — about $3.5 billion on 680 acres at New Carlisle, initial capacity 27 gigawatt-hours rising to 36, more than 1,600 jobs promised, mass production targeted for 2027. Construction was reported paused in May 2026, a GM spokesman saying it was "paused to align production capacity with current demand"; on 11 August 2026 Samsung SDI acquired GM's 49.99 percent stake and took sole ownership, adding an energy-storage line beside the automotive tooling. Lightsource bp's Honeysuckle Solar plant, 188 megawatts on about a thousand acres, entered service in 2024. And in December 2025 the town itself spoke in the argument: a petition to rezone 1,057 acres along Chicago Trail for a third data center — about $12 billion in the Tribune's account; one reference article prints $13 billion, and both figures stand — drew unfavorable recommendations from the Area Plan Commission and the County Council's Land Use Planning Committee, a resolution of opposition from the New Carlisle Town Council, and a 1 December support letter from the mayors of South Bend and Mishawaka and all three county commissioners. The County Council heard the petition on 9 December 2025 in a meeting running past 4 a.m. and rejected the rezoning 7–2 in the early hours of 10 December; the petition could return in six months, and through the autumn of 2026 the county's argument continued in moratorium and ban discussions. Town Council President Marcy Kauffman stated the town's ground publicly: the site lay close to town and outside the Enterprise Center, and approval "would invalidate years of hard work." The same years brought the railroad back into the town's future: a 2018 county study examined a new New Carlisle station on the South Shore; a March 2025 feasibility study favored a site near the American Legion Post, about a ten-minute walk from downtown; in September 2025 the county Redevelopment Commission backed that "Site B" and approved site-readiness work including a $169,950 professional-services change order — the meeting summaries date the action 6 September in one account and 16 September in another, and both print. A station, if built, would replace the Hudson Lake stop, and a possible opening in 2027 or 2028 has been stated; on 12 November 2025 the Board of Commissioners, by Resolution R-19-20-25, transferred three parcels to the Redevelopment Commission for the New Carlisle Economic Development Area, including 494 and 496 East Michigan Street — the old trailer park the county bought in 2020 as a potential station site — with the express statement that there is no final decision on a train station. Hudson Lake, in La Porte County, remains the nearest live stop, a flag stop and the line's lowest-ridership station; the town's current comprehensive plan lists a New Carlisle station as a major priority. The County Council has also voted 9–0 to rezone four parcels and grant a special use for a Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad freight terminal and rail yard near New Carlisle — a 120-acre site near a Cleveland-Cliffs cold-rolled steel plant, adjacent to both the South Shore tracks and U.S. 20 — though the railroad had not yet secured customers when the trade press reported it. The town of 1,891 that the stage road made is now deciding, parcel by parcel and vote by vote, what the data age makes of it; that argument is current history and is carried forward in this build's update windows.