Published January 11, 2024
Amazon takes next steps with two data center projects in Mesa
Amazon takes next steps with two data center projects in Mesa
Amazon.com Inc. looks to be getting closer to starting construction on two separate data center projects in southeast Mesa.
The company filed requests on Jan. 8 to the city of Mesa’s planning and zoning board asking for site plans to be approved as well as for special use permits for height and parking reduction for the two projects – going by the names PHX062 and PHX65.
Amazon’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) projects have yet to be put on a Planning and Zoning Board agenda, and it is unclear when exactly the projects will move forward.
"We recently filed documents as part of the process in exploring possible data center locations,” an Amazon Web Services spokesperson told the Business Journal. “This is part of our normal due diligence process as we are constantly evaluating new locations based on customer demand.”
The Business Journal first reported on the possibility of these data centers in September.
The plans for the data centers are almost identical. Each plan calls for 465,541 square feet for data center uses. Site plans for both projects show two main buildings and a smaller building for each project. One project specifically mentioned it will include 7,349 square feet of office space.
Both proposed projects would be built on land owned by Amazon. One of the proposed data center sites is on 42.9 acres off Elliot Road, next door to the Apple Data Center in Mesa. The other is located on 71.3 acres at 10464 E. Pecos Road, just east of Arizona Athletic Grounds, the huge youth and amateur sports complex formerly known as Legacy Sports Park.
Amazon acquired both of the Mesa sites being considered for data centers in December 2021. The company paid $16.9 million for the Elliot Road property; the Pecos property cost just over $18 million.
Amazon Web Services, the online retailer's cloud computing arm, has become an integral part of the company's business. In Amazon’s latest earnings report, which was for the third quarter of 2023, AWS brought in $23.06 billion in revenue, which was up 12% from the same quarter in 2022. The AWS segment also saw double-digit growth in both the first and second quarters of 2023.
According to a 2023 report published by Amazon, its data center and cloud computing businesses are significant economic drivers on both a national and local level. Between 2011 and 2022, AWS’s investment in cloud computing infrastructure added $37.69 billion to the nation’s GDP. Just the construction of the data centers from 2011 to 2022 added $21.44 billion to the U.S. GDP.
So far, Amazon data centers have been built in clusters — including in Northern California, Ohio, Oregon and Northern Virginia. In each of those locations Amazon said it invested billions of dollars and supports thousands of jobs.
The Phoenix area has become a hotbed for data center construction. Just on Elliot Road in Mesa, near one of the sites Amazon is considering for a data center, major companies such as Apple, Meta and Google all have or are constructing data centers.
