Microsoft Is Building Two Huge Data Centers In Arizona

Speaking to local news site AZ Central, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company plans to construct data centers on the Goodyear, Arizona sites it acquired over the past year.

Microsoft bought the first site in the area last year for $48 million. Last week the company spent an extra $37 million on a second site just ten miles away.

Five-building technology center

The sites will be Microsoft’s fifth cloud availability region in the West Coast of America, joining existing regions in West Central US, Utah, West US 2 in Washington State, West US in the San Francisco Bay Area, and US Gov in Arizona.

In an email, the Microsoft spokesperson said: “As part of our plans to support the growing demand for cloud and Internet services in Arizona and across the Western United States, Microsoft recently purchased land at two locations in Goodyear, Arizona where we intend to develop world-class data center facilities.”

Goodyear is already home to planned facilities from Vantage, Compass and Stream Data Centers.

According to the site plan, the buildings will be called PHX-10 and PHX-11. The first phase will cover about 245,000 square feet, with the second, later, phase coming in at 243,000 sq ft.

The areas that Microsoft has bought are Superfund sites, meaning that the land is polluted with hazardous materials. In this case, the area has been subject to run off from Airforce testing at the nearby Phoenix Goodyear airport.

Public documents previously called the project a “five-building technology center,” so it could be possible that Microsoft plans to build three more buildings on the 3.9 million sq ft site – but they might not necessarily be full data halls.

The development agreement for the facilities notes that each site could use up to one million gallons of water per day.

The Microsoft spokesperson said: “We have made long-term commitments to sustainability – using the power of our technology to minimize the environmental impact of our products and operations.

“Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012 and continues to make progress toward our goal of cutting our operational carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030.”―DCD