Rapidly Growing Arizona Data Center Hub Says It Has Enough

Greater Phoenix has been a top-ten US data center cluster for nearly a decade, and nowhere in the Valley of the Sun have data centers been proliferating faster than in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa.

Last week, Google announced the start of construction on the first phase of a $600M data center campus on a 167-acre site in Mesa. Also announcing plans for data center campuses in Mesa in recent weeks have been Novva Data Centers and EdgeConnex.

Earlier this year, EdgeCore and Edged Energy also put forward projects in Mesa. There are more than 15 new data center projects ready to enter the data center pipeline in Mesa, according to a report in The Mesa Tribune.

But the same report indicates that Mesa’s leaders have had an epiphany: data centers are not job creators, so the dwindling amount of industrial land available in the city can be put to better use.

Hyperscale data centers like Google’s typically are hailed as big-ticket economic development investments, but the fact remains that what huge data processing facilities consume in terms of land, electricity and water is not augmented by a large workforce.

Google’s project was approved by the city in 2019. Mesa provided $19M in tax incentives. After Google’s groundbreaking earlier this month, several city officials told the Tribune that they want to tap the brakes on data center development in Mesa and make room for job-rich industries on the remaining industrial land in the city.

“I believe we’ve seen more than our fair share of those data centers,” Scott Somers, a city council member who represents an area filled with data centers, told the newspaper.

“I’m concerned that what makes the Elliot Road Tech Corridor so valuable, like water availability, increased infrastructure when it comes to power, fiber optic cables—all are being eaten up by a single sector that doesn’t provide a lot of jobs,” Somers said.

Water conservation has become a huge concern in the Phoenix area as groundwater reserves have become depleted. New data center facilities in the Southwest are using waterless cooling systems.

“Moving forward, we need to think in terms of how many jobs and what quality of jobs are we getting in Mesa per square foot of space used, per acre-foot of water used, per megawatt of power that’s going to be drawn, and try to increase our numbers,” Somers said, according to the Tribune report.