A steel beam is hoisted into place during the “topping out” ceremony of the new QTS data center in Eagle Mountain on Friday, April 17, 2026. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
The bones of a 193-acre data center campus in Eagle Mountain are ready after developers placed the project’s last beam on Friday in an event crowded by the about 2,000 construction workers employed at the site.
The development by Layton Construction and QTS Data Centers, a Virginia-based company, is starting out with three buildings of between 592,000 and 579,000 square feet that have been under construction since last fall and are set to be completed later this year not far from the existing Meta data center.
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One aspect of the facilities that company executives highlighted during the event centered around the immense need for water notorious among most data centers. This one, they said, uses a closed-loop cooling system that would only need to be filled once and won’t consume any additional water for cooling systems once the project is operational.
“You guys are building, literally, the future. And while you all hear a lot of misinformation about what this future might be, and we should be afraid of it, I’m not afraid. Look at this group. This group has no fear. This group is building the future of America, literally,” Lane Anderson, executive vice president of development at QTS said during the event. “If this is the future, I want more of it. I want more of this in Utah.”
He referred to cooling systems that will be installed in the facilities, describing them as “super efficient.”
Data centers across the country consumed about 2.66 trillion liters of water in 2025, according to the research firm Mordor Intelligence, and are estimated to increase the number to 2.97 trillion liters this year. According to The Salt Lake Tribune and Grist, the Novva data center, spanning 1.5 million square feet in West Jordan, used 55,000 gallons of water to fill up a recirculated pipe cooling system once. If the campus had opted for an evaporative cooling system it would use about 250 million gallons a year, the report says. But, it uses more energy.
QTS committed $6 billion for the Eagle Mountain campus and estimates that once the project is completed, it will host 100 permanent jobs, including workers from QTS, its tenants and contractors.
That was one of the project’s highlights for Eagle Mountain Mayor Jared Gray, who argued that in the face of a high growth rate, the city is paying special attention to how it grows.
“This QTS campus represents major investments in Eagle Mountain. It’s already supporting construction jobs, bringing long-term, high-quality benefits that QTS will bring to our community,” Gray said on Friday.
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