When the developer Novva first announced that it was building Utah’s largest data center campus just south of Salt Lake City, the company’s CEO touted the many advantages of the region: among them a low risk of disasters, an expanding international airport, no sales tax on equipment, and the high altitude cold of the desert landscape, which would help keep cooling costs down. Perhaps most importantly, power would be cheap. Utah has some of the lowest electricity costs in the country.
“We believe Utah is a hidden gem for one of the largest wholesale colocation campuses in the United States,” CEO and founder Wes Swenson said in a 2020 press release.
But the company quickly ran into trouble. Rocky Mountain Power, the local utility, was not able to provide the full amount of energy that the data center needed until 2031 — and even then it wasn’t guaranteed. How exactly that power would be transmitted to the remote facility was also uncertain.
Locked out of options with Rocky Mountain, Novva decided to build i... Read more
