Company Proposes $1 Billion Data Center in Great Falls
New data center expects to create 150 to 200 "high-paying permanent positions."
A company proposed a new data center in Great Falls, which could have a significant impact on the city’s economy.
The Great Falls Development Alliance unveiled this proposal at its annual meeting last week.
Ardent, a real estate development firm, and its data center platform, TAC Data Centers, announced plans to build a 2 million-square-foot “hyperscale data center” campus in the Central Montana town.
According to the proposal, the data center would be built on a 569-acre site located on the eastern edge of Great Falls, north of Malmstrom Air Force Base.
Ardent said it would invest between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in the development known as Project Cardinal.
In addition, Project Cardinal anticipates creating an additional 1,500 to 2,000 construction jobs, along with 150 to 200 “high-paying permanent positions.”
“This project will provide an extensive commercial tax base to the community without burdening the roads or schools,” the proposal says.
Ardent stated it expects the full campus to be ready by 2030. The company projects zoning, permitting and securing power will take anywhere from 12 to 18 months. Also, the first phases of the facility are predicted to be online “by late 2027 to early 2028.”
The company said it is working with Northwestern Energy to do a transmission study, but the progress on it has “been slow and timelines are unclear.”
In the proposal, Ardent said Montana has a “regulated electricity market which means” Northwestern Energy “controls the transmission infrastructure.”
The company said this adds some “complexity” to building the data center, and it will need to find “additional sources of power generation which will be required to interconnect through the Northwestern transmission grid.”
Ardent noted it has had “productive talks” with Berkshire Hathaway Montana, BHE Canada, Alberta Ex and other power generation sources. Despite these discussions, the company said it can’t move forward “without Northwestern’s cooperation.”
The proposal stated Ardent is requesting “500-600 megawatts critical load” from Northwestern Energy and “other power generation sources.”
Currently, Montana has nine operational data centers.
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Zachery Schmidt is the founder of The Montana Chronicles. If you have any tips, please send them to montanachronicles@proton.me.