CIM Group, a real estate and infrastructure owner, operator, lender and developer, and Novva Data Centers, a data center company, announced on March 5 that they recently closed a new commitment of $2 billion in financing from J.P. Morgan and Starwood Property Trust to complete the build-out of Novva’s 175-MW Salt Lake City data center.
Founded in 2019 by CIM Group and Novva’s management team, “Novva has moved quickly to bring its vision of purpose-built, sustainable data centers to life amid the soaring demand for capacity driven by increasing adoption of cloud computing and artificial intelligence,” the companies said.
The new financing will allow Novva to complete the second and third phases of construction of its 100-acre data center campus located in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan, Utah.
Phase 2 of the project began construction in December 2023 and will feature the campus’s second 318,000-square-foot data center, which will have the capacity to produce 72MW of critical IT load and is expected to be fully complete by 2026.
Phase 3 started construction in January 2024 and will also feature a 318,000-square-foot data center with 72MW critical IT capacity, and is expected to be complete in 2026.
When completed, the Salt Lake City data center campus will span a total of one million square feet and feature 175MW of capacity, making it one of the largest direct-to-chip cooled AI data centers in the world.
The first phase of the campus began operations in 2023 and has become well-known for its design and engineering aspects, including the ability to operate without water year-round and cool with ambient air. The campus was fully leased in 2023 to a leading global tech company.
A spokesperson for the companies did not respond to a request from Public Power Current for details on the name of the utility that will supply power to the data center.
In addition to its Salt Lake City campus, Novva also operates data centers in Colorado Springs, Colorado and Las Vegas, Nevada and is in the process of building data centers in Reno, Nevada, San Francisco and Mesa, Arizona.
Novva employs renewable energy, high-density capacity, water-free cooling and innovative technologies like AI-powered robotic dogs for security and infrastructure monitoring in all its data centers. It has secured leases from top hyperscale AI and tech companies.
J.P. Morgan acted as Lead Arranger and Starwood Property Trust acted as Arranger for the financing.
