Copyright Salt Lake City Deseret News
A state-of-the-art facility is due to break ground next month in Millard County, utilizing land owned by one of the founding partners, as well as water rights that belonged to his family for 50 years. Joule is a next generation advanced AI data center and energy development company that expects the build-out to occur in phases, securing jobs for the region in rural Utah. This data center is different than you are used to reading about. Instead of draining power off the Rocky Mountain Power grid, Joule plans to build its own self-contained power plant and generate as much power as what is used on the Wasatch Front. Founders Mark McDougal and David Gray said it is the largest private project in the history of Utah and they intend to make good on their promise of preserving the rural feel of Millard County. “You can’t have a neighborhood with a farm underneath it. We picked a spot that is conducive to both activities,” Gray said. “We want to be wise stewards of the resources we have been given.” McDougal and his family have farmed this 4,000-acre parcel of land for decades, and even with full build-out of the project there will be “agricultural bumpers” to keep that tradition going. “It’s in our blood.” It wasn’t exactly a back of an envelope type of concept, but Gray and McDougal put their heads together about a dozen years ago to envision what will become this unique data center that will use a closed loop cooling and heating system for the computational benefits of AI data centers. Why the need for data centers? Data centers are the backbone of the digital economy, powering nearly every online or connected service in modern life. Without them, much of the country’s digital economy — such as cloud computing, e-commerce and online communications — would be in jeopardy. According to data from Baxtel, Utah currently has 47 data center facilities that occupy over 6.3 million square feet and consume nearly 600 megawatts of power. While the biggest single facility is the National Security Agency’s 1.5-million-square-foot data center in Saratoga Springs, Facebook owner Meta is the biggest single operator with seven data centers in the state, per Baxtel data. A report issued nearly a year ago by Power Engineering noted Utah is poised to be one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the country. Estimates put near-term growth in the Salt Lake region of 699%, second only to Las Vegas/Reno, Nevada. Growth is being driven by tax incentives, real estate and the growing tech presence along Utah’s so-called Silicon Slopes in Utah County. But this facility by Joule is unique. It uses its own water already secured decades ago and its own land, not gobbling up a new geographic footprint. It will not be a power vampire, but instead will produce 1.3 gigawatts of power — in the first phase. “When you think about it, we are building a power plant on our site. It is very nontraditional,” McDougal said. “All of our generators are in the same area as our data center. That power generation, the spikes and the valleys of the large computational problems — it is not a steady state of power — there are ups and downs and all arounds and we can match the demand to the load." Gray and McDougal say that means they do not have to depend on the major utility player in the state — Rocky Mountain Power — for demand side management such as load shifting, price management or even transmission dependency because the power generated on site will be used there. The project emphasizes speed to market, independent power and environmentally friendly water efficient cooling systems. That is a benefit for hyperscale data center operators such as major cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Oracle, OpenAI, xAI or other large tech firms seeking infrastructure ready to lease or purchase. The Lehi-based company is using Utah companies for its project — from architectural design to installation of the necessary equipment. Both Gray and McDougal said they have received unanimous consent from the Millard County Commission for their project, with commissioners granting a conditional use permit for the data center. Both extolled the closed loop system which puts the data center in a class of its own, as well as the self-contained power plant. “It’s very unique in the data center world,” Gray said. “It is an old application of a new technology.”
