Microsoft has announced it plans to build the largest data center ever built in the United States, earlier this week. With it’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is a major cloud player with services that include Office 365 and its Azure cloud platform.
The company has chosen West Des Moines in Iowa for the location of the data center which marks the third data center that they will build in West Des Moine. The construction of the data center is being called “Project Osmium” and will start later this year. The total capital investment made by Microsoft for Project Osmium is expected to be between $1.5 and $2 billion.
Microsoft’s new facility will be built on 200 acres of land in Warren and Madison Counties. The project will include four phases culminating in a finished data center sized around 1.7 million square feet. Alongside other investments in the area, the new facility will mean Microsoft’s investment in West Des Moines will total around $3.5 billion.
Steve Gaer, Mayor, West Des Moines says :
Project Osmium will be the largest data center deployment Microsoft has ever built in the United States. We are extremely honored and excited to announce that it will be located in West Des Moines.
We have proven ourselves as a development-ready community with a quality of life standard that is attractive to major players in the tech arena.