It's been revealed that Google is the company behind a planned data center campus in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
News of a planned data center campus in Cedar Rapids surfaced last month. A company working behind the name Heaviside LLC was proposing to develop a $576 million data center campus along 76th Avenue SW and Edgewood Road SW in the Big Cedar Industrial Center.
As reported by local press including the Gazette, Google has now been named in Iowa Economic Development Authority documents as the company behind the project.
The authority is meeting this week to discuss a $56 million, 20-year property tax rebate for the project. It would create 31 permanent jobs. The Cedar Rapids City Council approved its own financial incentives for the project last month.
According to authority documents, construction on the data center is set to start in Q2 2024 for a 2026 go-live date. Further details on the scope of the data center development haven’t been shared. CBS Iowa reports the company is planning at least two buildings.
Cedar Rapids, in Linn County, is located around 120 miles east of Des Moines. It is not traditionally a large data center market.
“This is an extremely important economic development project for Cedar Rapids and our region,” Ceder Rapids city manager Jeff Pomeranz told the Gazette. “We have a lot of confidence in Google that this will be a tremendous benefit not just for the company but for the community, and we look forward to the board reviews of the application tomorrow.”
Owned by Alliant Energy, the Big Cedar Industrial Center is a 1.390-acre industrial site. A brochure from the energy firm suggests the site currently has 85MW of excess capacity, with opportunities for future substations to take the whole center to 1.2GW.
Google already operates one Iowa campus in Council Bluffs. Plans for the Council Bluffs data center were first announced in 2007 – with expansions announced in 2012, 2015, and 2023. According to Baxtel, Google has two data centers in Council Bluffs, one near Lake Manawa and another Southlands campus. Baxtel reports that the Southlands Council Bluff campus has four buildings with a total of 2.9 million sq ft (270,000 sqm).
Microsoft has a significant presence in Iowa, centered around West Des Moines. Apple and Meta also developing campuses in the state.
