The modern fact Eagle Mountain
Four names, one operating campus, and an argument about water
The data centers, and what is actually built
One campus is running. Meta has operated here since 2021. QTS committed six billion dollars on 193 acres and topped out in April 2026, with no building open yet. Tract holds more than 668 acres of land, and Google has held 300 acres since October 2021 with nothing announced. So of the four names people count, one is a working data center and three are land or construction, and the water question runs through all of it.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
People count four names in Eagle Mountain, and only one is a working data center. Meta has operated a campus on the city's south side since 2021. QTS is the biggest single commitment, six billion dollars on 193 acres, but it topped out in April 2026 and had not opened a building as of September 2026. The other two are land, not projects: Tract holds more than 668 acres it is preparing for other operators, and Google has held 300 acres since October 2021 with nothing announced. The story to keep straight is the gap between what is built and what has only been announced, and the water question runs through the whole of it.
How it began
The founding story and the data center story are the same story
Eagle Mountain was built on cheap, flat, empty valley floor. Three investors bought roughly eight thousand acres of Cedar Valley ground at a bankruptcy auction in 1994, the town incorporated in 1996 covering twenty four square miles, and annexation pushed it past forty square miles within two years. It is a city founded on the one thing nobody wanted much of back then, which is unencumbered flat land at scale.
Thirty years later that is exactly what a hyperscale data center wants more than anything, and the city set out to be the easiest place in the state to build one. Its Regional Technology Innovation overlay allows data centers, advanced manufacturing and research uses by right, with an expedited administrative review of site plans and permits, and that is the sentence developers quote when they explain why they came. Utah's data center sales tax position does the rest.
So the founding of the city and the industry now landing on it are not two subjects. They are one subject seen thirty years apart. And the argument that has come with it, which is about water, is the oldest argument in this valley: the Pony Express station on this ground sold water hauled over the mountains at twenty five cents a bucket, because Cedar Valley never had enough of its own.
The cluster, as of September 2026
1
campus actually operating, out of four names
$6 billion
the stated QTS commitment, on 193 acres
668+ acres
the land bank Tract closed on in January 2024
~100
permanent jobs QTS projects once complete
Buying or selling in Eagle Mountain?
Delivered against announced
Four names, one operating campus, and a great deal of drawn ground
All four names turn up in the same sentences, and they sit at four completely different stages. Here is what exists set next to what has only been announced.
| Meta | QTS | Tract | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status as of 2026 | Operating. The first building came online in 2021 | Topped out 17 April 2026; first three buildings rising through 2026. None operational | Land and infrastructure only. Nothing vertical committed | Land held. No construction announced |
| What was committed | Announced May 2018; expansion has brought the stated total to about $1.5 billion | $6 billion across 193 acres, with five buildings planned and three under way | More than 668 acres closed in January 2024, including a 225 acre technology park | 300 acres bought on Pony Express Parkway in October 2021 |
| What it is doing | Running a live data center campus on the employment corridor | Construction. The last structural beam went in with about 2,000 construction workers on site | Developing land and power, and selling or leasing pads to operators | Nothing publicly announced since the purchase |
| Permanent jobs | Few. Data centers are capital heavy and job light by nature | About 100 once the campus is complete, per the company | None directly. Tract is a land and infrastructure developer | None announced |
| Power | Reported as 100 percent net new renewable supply under Rocky Mountain Power's Schedule 34, the first use of that tariff | Not separately published | Working with Rocky Mountain Power toward more than 400 megawatts of new transmission by 2028 | Not applicable |
Figures are the companies' and the city's own stated numbers as of September 2026, not audited totals, and construction status moves quickly. Announced is not built: three of these four columns describe something that has not opened.
Why the Meta building count is hard to pin down
The trackers and the company do not agree, and the campus has been expanded more than once. Industry trackers put the Meta campus at roughly 4.5 million square feet across several buildings, after a two building expansion announced in 2022 added about two million square feet on its own. What is not in dispute is the shape of it: the campus opened in 2021, it has grown since, and the stated total investment is about 1.5 billion dollars.
The live argument
The water question here is old, specific and still not fully answerable
In 2018 Eagle Mountain agreed with Meta to keep the facility's monthly water use confidential, and to notify the company whenever somebody requested those records. That is a documented arrangement rather than an allegation, it has been reported repeatedly, and it is the reason residents asking a simple question about their own municipal water supply have not always been able to get a simple answer. Whatever view anyone takes of data centers, that is the fact the local argument starts from.
The Legislature has since moved. House Bill 76 of the 2026 general session, Data Center Water Transparency Amendments, requires operators of qualifying data centers to report water use, with reporting duties running ahead of construction and then annually, and it took effect in May 2026. It is genuinely new law rather than a proposal. What it does not obviously do is reach backward: reporting obligations of this kind attach to facilities coming through the process, so whether an already operating campus is covered is a question to settle by reading the bill itself, and a real estate attorney can tell you how it lands on a specific address.
The newest campus has made a promise, and it should be read as a promise. QTS has said its Eagle Mountain cooling system is closed loop, filled once and consuming no additional water for cooling in operation, a claim its executives repeated in the April 2026 coverage of the topping out. Closed loop cooling is a real and materially different design from evaporative cooling, and comparable Utah facilities have reported recirculating volumes measured in tens of thousands of gallons rather than hundreds of millions a year. But as of September 2026 that campus had not opened, which means the promise has no operating record behind it yet.
The honest position for anybody weighing an address here is therefore three sentences long. One campus is operating under a confidentiality arrangement dating from 2018. A new transparency law exists and its reach over existing facilities is a question to read the statute on. And the largest commitment in the valley has made a strong design claim that will be testable once it runs. None of that is a reason to panic and none of it is a reason to wave the subject away.
Treat every water figure on this cluster as carrying a date. The QTS closed loop cooling claim is a design commitment, not an operating record: as of September 2026 no QTS building in Eagle Mountain had opened. The transparency law is House Bill 76 of the 2026 general session, in effect since May 2026, and whether its reporting duties reach a facility that was already running is a question for the statute. Read the bill and the city's own utility publications before you rely on a number.
The city's own answer
The lawns at the flagship park are watered with what the servers used first
The counterweight to all of that is a project the city documents itself and is entitled to be pleased about. Water used at the Meta campus is treated by Eagle Mountain to Type 1 effluent standard, which is the state's quality bar for irrigating public landscape, and then used to water Cory B. Wride Memorial Park. The city puts the saving at nearly seventy eight million gallons of potable water in 2024 alone.
It took building. The project started in 2020, needed filtration plant at both the city's water treatment facility and at the park itself plus a booster station to hold pressure, cost roughly five million dollars, and became fully operational in June 2024. The city has said it intends to extend the project to nearby subdivisions and other public landscape and is pursuing the state reuse water rights that would allow it, while stating that there are no immediate plans for a community wide rollout.
That is worth stating precisely because it is the rare case where an industrial neighbor and a municipal water problem have produced something measurable rather than a press release. It does not answer the confidentiality question and it does not tell anybody how much water the campus draws in the first place. It does mean that the largest lawn in the city, the one the splash pad and the carnival and the parade all sit next to, is not drinking a drop of culinary supply.
For a household the practical translation is small but real: the flagship park's irrigation is not competing with household use in July, and the city has a working template it says it wants to extend. Whether that template reaches a specific neighborhood is a question for the city's public utilities department, tied to the address.
Nearly seventy eight million gallons of drinking water in one year, kept in the system because a park is watered with what a server hall used first.
What the city actually runs on
Groundwater, purchased water and 13.3 million gallons of storage
Underneath the argument there is an ordinary municipal water system, and its published shape is the useful context for everything above. These are the city's own figures, and they carry the date they were adopted.
Eagle Mountain draws from two sources: groundwater pumped from its own wells, and water purchased from the Central Utah Water Conservancy District. Storage is eight culinary tanks holding a combined 13,279,465 gallons, with an additional four million gallon tank in the upper White Hills area in the city's plans. The updated Water Conservation and Management Plan was adopted on 26 November 2024 and is the document that carries all of it.
That is a system built for a city growing faster than almost any other in the state, and it is worth reading the reuse project in that light rather than as an environmental gesture. Every gallon that does not go onto a municipal lawn is a gallon available to a rooftop that has not been built yet, which in a city with most of its fifty square miles still unbuilt is a live planning question rather than an abstraction.
Pressurized secondary irrigation is worth a specific question rather than a general answer. Provision varies by area in this city, and it is the sort of thing that changes what a summer of watering costs a household, so it belongs in a written answer from the city's public utilities department about a specific address.
Keep reading
More of Eagle Mountain on The Local
Things to do
The top 9, ranked
Nine entries, seven of them free, and four of them end in open desert.
Read the guideThe trail
The Pony Express Trail
Eighteen months of mail in 1860, two stations here, and 133 miles of gravel west.
Read the guideFifteen minutes out
Camp Floyd
An 1858 army post seven miles down the highway, open Monday to Saturday.
Read the guideHow it began
A valley, annexed
Bought at auction in 1994, incorporated in 1996, and 50.43 square miles by now.
Read the guideMoving here
Living in Cedar Valley
One road east, an open west desert wind, and what it takes to commute from Cedar Valley.
Read the guideThe overview
Eagle Mountain, in full
The trail across it, the cluster rising on it, and the auction it all began at.
Read the pageQuick answers
The cluster, answered
One operating campus and three names at earlier stages, as of September 2026. Meta's campus opened its first building in 2021 and is the only one running. QTS is building a 193 acre campus that topped out on 17 April 2026 with its first three buildings rising through the rest of that year. Tract holds more than 668 acres and develops land and power rather than building data centers itself. Google bought 300 acres on Pony Express Parkway in October 2021 and has announced no construction since.
Not as of September 2026. Construction began in September 2025, the last structural beam was placed on 17 April 2026 with around two thousand construction workers on site for the topping out, and the first three buildings, each of roughly 579,000 to 592,000 square feet, were rising through 2026. Five buildings are planned in all. The company has put the commitment at six billion dollars across 193 acres and projects about a hundred permanent jobs once the campus is complete.
Land and process, mostly. The city holds a large supply of flat, unencumbered ground captured by annexations in the 1990s, and its Regional Technology Innovation overlay permits data centers, advanced manufacturing and research uses by right with an expedited administrative review of site plans and permits. Developers cite that overlay directly when explaining the choice. Utah's data center sales tax position and the availability of new transmission capacity do the rest. It is the same quality of ground that made the city cheap to assemble in the first place.
That is the live local question and it does not have a clean public answer. In 2018 the city agreed with Meta to keep the facility's monthly water use confidential and to notify the company when records were requested. House Bill 76 of the 2026 general session, Data Center Water Transparency Amendments, now requires qualifying operators to report water use ahead of construction and annually, and took effect in May 2026. Whether its duties reach an already operating facility is a question to settle by reading the statute rather than a summary.
The company says its system is closed loop, filled once and consuming no additional water for cooling once running, and its executives repeated that in the April 2026 coverage of the topping out. Closed loop cooling is a genuinely different design from evaporative cooling and comparable Utah facilities have reported recirculating volumes in the tens of thousands of gallons rather than hundreds of millions a year. It should be read as a design commitment rather than an operating record, because as of September 2026 no building on that campus had opened.
Yes, and the city documents it. Water used at the Meta campus is treated by the city to Type 1 effluent standard, the state's bar for irrigating public landscape, and used to water Cory B. Wride Memorial Park. The city puts the saving at nearly seventy eight million gallons of potable water in 2024. The project began in 2020, required filtration plant at the treatment facility and at the park plus a booster station, cost roughly five million dollars and became fully operational in June 2024. The city says it intends to extend it.
Far fewer than the investment figures suggest, and that is the nature of the industry rather than a criticism of these projects. QTS projects about a hundred permanent jobs once its campus is complete, against a six billion dollar commitment. Construction employment is a different and much larger number for a limited period: around two thousand construction workers were on site for the QTS topping out in April 2026. Data centers change a city's tax base, its power infrastructure and its construction economy more than its payroll.
Holding and developing land rather than operating data centers. Tract closed on more than 668 acres in January 2024 across two parcels, including a 225 acre technology park, and its business is preparing sites and power and then selling or leasing pads to operators. It has said it is working with Rocky Mountain Power toward more than 400 megawatts of new transmission capacity by 2028. As of September 2026 nothing vertical had been committed on that ground, which is why it appears in coverage of the cluster without appearing on the skyline.
Not as far as anything published shows. Google bought a 300 acre parcel on Pony Express Parkway in October 2021, across from the Meta campus, described at the time as a potential data center site with no confirmed timeline, alongside a written commitment to spend in the area over a long horizon. No construction has been announced since. It is accurate to describe it as land held by Google and inaccurate to describe it as a project underway, and the two get conflated in almost every summary of this cluster.
A cluster on the city's south side, and a set of questions worth asking before an offer
None of this changes what a house is, and all of it changes the context a house sits in: what is planned on the open ground behind a back fence, which end of the city a street belongs to, how a parcel is served for outdoor water, and what the road plans on the one route east are actually funded to do. Those are answerable questions with a planning department, a utilities department and somebody who works this ground. Tell me which streets you are circling and I will put you with a Utah County partner agent on this side of the Lake Mountains, and stay on the file for the financing side.
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