A 178-acre data center campus proposed in Mesa. What to know
Developers proposed a 178-acre data center hub with 11 buildings in southeast Mesa along Pecos and Crismon roads.
The property owner Pacific Proving LLC submitted the preliminary paperwork to the city on Monday to develop the area as a data center and technology employment campus.
Data center announcements for the city and metro Phoenix have become the new norm as a new study found the area to be the biggest hub in the western U.S. and the second nationally for this type of development.
The facilities house servers, networking equipment and other apparatus and are often criticized for their lack of job opportunities and water use to keep the building cool.
About 140 acres of the Pacific Proving Technology Campus will need to be annexed into the city to receive city utility services and be rezoned to light industrial. Mesa had earmarked the area for mixed-use community development not employment in its long-term planning documents.
Pacific Proving’s application states its project will encourage additional growth in technological users and business because of its proximity to the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport and the city’s Pecos Advanced Manufacturing Zone.
The campus plans to include:
A three-story office building of approximately 150,000 square feet for office and employment space.
A one-story, approximately 95,000 square foot warehouse building.
Nine one-story data hall spec buildings of approximately 2.3 million square feet for future employment users.
The developers will install a closed loop water cooling system that is filled once to enhance efficiency, the application states. The system is “entirely self-contained and does not employ any evaporative cooling methods that would result in evaporative or condensation loss,” the application reads.
The proposed project is situated just east of Arizona Athletic Grounds, formally known as Legacy Park. Pacific Proving is also the youth sports facility’s landlord and is a major developer in the area.
Other Mesa-based data centers in the pipeline
Data center development in southeast Mesa has ramped up over the years by big-named tech companies.
In September, Google broke ground on a new $600 million data center that company executives said would not use water-based cooling and instead would be air-cooled.
It will join other companies like Apple and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, that all plan to build in the city. Meta’s facility is expected to be completed in 2026.
In September, Amazon submitted planning applications to build two data centers on 43-acre company-owned land along Signal Butte and Elliot roads.
A Utah-based data center developer purchased 165 acres of state land for $62.7 million in August.
Reporter Maritza Dominguez covers Mesa, Gilbert and Queen Creek and can be reached at maritza.dominguez@arizonarepublic.com or 480-271-0646. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @maritzacdom.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 178 acres poised for data center campus in Mesa. What to know
