Amazon has had a data center development in the City of Gilroy, California, approved.

Planned for 8050 Camino Arroyo, the data center project will sit on a 56-acre parcel of land. It will comprise two buildings with a total of 438,500 sq ft (40,738 sqm) of floorspace.

Amazon purchased the land in 2020 for $31.28 million via its Amazon Data Services affiliate.

The plot in question is bordered by Gilroy Premium Outlets, Kaiser Permanente's South County offices, and the US 101. Plans for the data centers were first shared in 2022, though approval has been waiting on environmental impact studies.

The first phase will see the development of a single-story 218,000 sq ft (20,253 sqm) data center building, and would require a power connection of 49MW from Pacific Gas and Electric. The data center would have 25 2.5MW emergency generators for redundancy purposes.

The project will also see an on-site substation developed, and a 2,500 sq ft security building.

In addition, the project plan states that Amazon could develop a Battery Energy Storage System on the site with up to 50MW of storage capacity.

The second construction phase would see a second building of the same approximate site, but would not use the same utilities as those constructed in phase one. The second phase aims to use the BESS capacity or fuel cell technology for backup power, and will employ lithium-ion battery modules for each server rack while the backup power solution is being developed.

Approval was granted by Gilroy community development director Sharon Goei on July 3. Currently, no details about the construction timeline or expected completion date have been shared.

Gilroy, located in Santa Clara County and some 30 miles southeast of San Jose, has little in the way of data center presence.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) operates its US-West-1 region out of California.