Eagle Mountain’s data centers

The four campuses

Every project here sits in the northwest corner of the city, around the Pony Express Parkway, on land the council rezoned to its Regional Technology and Industry overlay. The companies sign their agreements through local companies set up for the purpose, so the minutes often name the company rather than the brand. Each card says whether the record ties the company to the brand.

Sources: KSL, 30 May 2018; Meta, July 2021; Deseret News, 30 Sep 2022; Meta, Sep 2026; QTS; Daily Herald, 20 Apr 2026; Deseret News, 4 Oct 2021; Salt Lake Tribune via Grist, 24 Feb 2026; Eagle Mountain City, Jan 2024; pipeline notice filed with the Utah PSC; and the minutes linked under every vote.

The tax incentives

Three groups are involved, and it helps to keep them apart:

• The company, such as Meta, which owns the buildings and pays the tax bill.
• The five taxing bodies: Alpine School District, Eagle Mountain City, Utah County, the Unified Fire Service Area and the Central Utah Water Conservancy District. Every property tax bill here is split among them. The school district’s cut is by far the largest, about 63 cents of each dollar; the city’s is about 6 cents.
• The redevelopment agency, a separate city fund that holds the incentive money. Its board is the city council.

The incentive works like this:

1. The company pays its whole property tax bill, like any owner.
2. The tax the land paid before anything was built keeps going to the five taxing bodies. For Meta’s first campus that was $66 a year, $6 of it to the city.
3. The new tax on top of that, which exists only because of the buildings, goes to the redevelopment agency instead. The documents call this new tax the “increment.”
4. The agency pays most of it back to the company, at the rates in the table below, for up to 20 years per building.
5. When those 20 years end, the building’s whole tax bill goes to the five taxing bodies, like any other property.

Each taxing body agrees to its own terms, and the school district negotiated lower rates for Meta’s expansion. Utah law calls the tool a community reinvestment area.

Dollar figures on this page are labeled by kind: paid (it happened), agreed (a limit or promise in a signed agreement), projected (someone’s forecast), or the company’s figure (what a company says about itself, which no one has checked).

Sources: council and agency minutes, 15 May 2018; agency annual report to the taxing bodies, 2020.

How much each company gets back

Sources: Planning Commission minutes, 11 Jun 2024; Deseret News, 22 May 2018; council minutes, 16 Mar 2021; redevelopment agency packet, 20 Aug 2024; agency packet, 6 Jan 2026 (Sweetwater #4 plan, table 4.2).

How long the rebates last

You will hear both “20 years” and “40 years.” Both are true, about different things:

• 20 years is the most any one building gets money back. The documents call a building, or a group built together, a “phase.”
• 40 years is when the whole deal ends. The company can keep adding buildings, and each new one starts its own 20 years, but nothing is paid after year 40.

An example, with made-up years: if the first building’s rebate starts in 2027, it ends by 2046. A building whose rebate starts in 2040 runs to 2059. One that starts in 2060 gets only until 2066, when the 40 years run out.

Meta’s first area (2018). Staff described Meta’s request as 80% of the real property tax and 100% of the personal property tax returned “over 20 years”. The same night the council set the duration of the tax increment agreement at 40 years, the most state law allows, and required that any phase beyond the ones in the plan be added to the plan and budget before it could be paid. Utah County’s report shows two Meta phases here: the first paid 2021 to 2040, the second 2023 to 2042. No meeting on file since 2019 adds a third, and the county has not posted a report newer than tax year 2023.

Meta’s expansion (2025). Sweetwater #4, the 567 acres to the south, is a separate area with its own agreements and its own clock, and it sets no limit on the number of phases. Each phase is paid for 20 years, starting the year after its first building is cleared for occupancy, and nothing is paid after the 40th year from the start of the first phase. The agency decides when that first phase starts; its plan says as early as 2026. Each taxing body also capped what it gives up: Eagle Mountain City at $7,773,762 a phase and $46,642,572 in all, and every body’s total cap is six times its per-phase one. The water district stops contributing 20 years after the first phase. Meta can ask for longer periods, but only the taxing bodies can agree to them.

So “a 40-year tax break” is too long for any one building, and “only 20 years” is too short for the whole deal. The expansion’s 40 years have not started.

Sources: council minutes, 15 May 2018 (pp. 146–150 and 157–158 of the PDF); Utah County Auditor, 2023 Report 700 for Eagle Mountain; the Sweetwater #4 interlocal agreements in the agency packet, 5 Nov 2025; Meta’s participation agreement in the agency packet, 16 Dec 2025.

Meta’s expansion: what the $778.5 million is

$778.5 million is a guess about the future, not money anyone has paid. A consultant for the city, LRB Public Finance Advisors, estimated what Meta might build on the expansion land and how much new property tax that would bring in over 40 years. The answer was about $1 billion. Under the deal:

• about $225 million of it would go to the five taxing bodies, as normal tax;
• about $778.5 million would go to the redevelopment agency, and most of that would be paid back to Meta.

None of it exists yet, because no building on this land is finished. If Meta builds less, the numbers shrink. If Meta builds nothing, they are zero. The report itself says its figures “are estimates only.” Today the land pays $21 a year in property tax, and that keeps going to the taxing bodies either way.

Whether to count the $778.5 million as tax given up depends on a question no one can prove: would Meta have built here without the deal? The consultant’s report says no, that the land “would remain in its underutilized state.”

If the forecast came true, here is how much each taxing body would send to the agency instead of keeping:

Meta’s participation agreement, which the agency board approved 5–0 on 16 December 2025, sets Meta’s rebate as everything the agency collects from the area, less the 10% for housing, a reserve of up to $5,000 for the agency’s costs, and $50,000 a year for each phase that the agency holds back and pays to the school district. If the plan’s forecast came true, almost all of the $688.8 million would go to Meta, less those school payments. The agreement also requires Meta to give $1.5 million to the education foundation of the school district that taxes the area, and $10,000 each to the foundations of the other two districts that succeed Alpine, by the end of the year construction starts. The agency owes Meta nothing beyond the increment it receives: if Meta doesn’t build, the agency pays nothing.

Sources: Sweetwater #4 plan and budget as amended, tables 3, 4.2 and 4.3, in the agency packet, 6 Jan 2026; Meta’s participation agreement and the staff report in the agency packet, 16 Dec 2025; the city’s interlocal agreement in the agency packet, 5 Nov 2025.

What else the companies get

• A state sales tax exemption on data center machinery and equipment, under Utah Code 59-12-104. The city does not grant it and cannot withhold it. The state Tax Commission has said it cannot estimate what it costs (Utah News Dispatch, 31 Aug 2026).
• A rebate of the city’s energy tax, the 6% the city charges on electricity and gas bills. The Curleybird agreement allows up to 80% back if the power is renewable; the same minutes say Facebook receives 100% (council minutes, 15 Jun 2021). Tract’s 2024 comparison gives other figures: Meta 50% (a base rebate and a renewable rebate together), Google 80%, Tract 35% and QTS none (Planning Commission minutes, 11 Jun 2024). Meta’s 2025 expansion agreement works differently. Meta pays the tax as if it bought its power at Rocky Mountain Power’s rate, and if its power costs more than that, the city refunds the extra tax the higher price creates, out of the tax Meta paid (development agreement, section 4.5, council packet, 21 Oct 2025).
• Credits against city fees for roads and water lines the companies build that serve more than their own land. See Roads and pipes.

The Legislature has since changed the rules

H.B. 507, passed in 2026, bars cities from offering this kind of incentive to a data center of 100 megawatts or more after 6 May 2027, unless it sits in a zone the state designates. Agreements already signed continue but cannot be extended.

Source: Office of Legislative Research, data centers policy brief, Aug 2026.

What they pay

The record answers this in part. It shows what Meta’s campus sent to the agency, and no QTS building is on the tax rolls yet.

Meta

Meta (on paper, Stadion, LLC) is the largest property taxpayer in the city, at $305.4 million of taxable value in fiscal 2024. Here is what has actually happened on its first campus, under the 2018 deal. Its 2025 expansion is a separate deal with different terms, described above, and nothing on it is built yet.

• Before Meta built, the land paid $66 a year in property tax, $6 of it to the city.
• In 2023, the campus paid about $9.7 million in new tax on top of that.
• While the deal runs, the school district, the city and the other three taxing bodies still get only that $66 a year from the campus’s property tax, $6 of it to the city. Everything above $66 goes to the redevelopment agency. This is true of the first campus only: under the expansion deal, the taxing bodies keep part of the new tax.
• The $9.7 million went to the agency, which pays most of it back to Meta. No published record shows exactly how much.
• After each building’s 20 years, its whole tax bill goes to the taxing bodies. In 2018 city staff estimated that would be “over $8M annually,” $758,000 of it to the city. That was a projection; the first building’s 20 years end in 2040.

The county’s report shows which taxing body the $9.7 million came from:

In June 2022 the city’s finance staff told the council that taxable value had “increased by almost two billion dollars”, “mostly due to the Meta development”, and that “as a result, the certified tax rate has been reduced.”

Sources: Eagle Mountain annual financial report, FY2024, principal taxpayers; 2023 Report 700; council minutes, 21 Jun 2022; council minutes, 15 May 2018.

QTS: figures that have not been reconciled

“The impact will generate over $19 million a year for our local jurisdictions… Just for Eagle Mountain City alone, in our current tax rate, that would be $2.7 million a year… QTS was granted some tax incentives when they started those first 3 buildings. They came back on these next 2… and said… we don’t want any incentives on these next builds.”

A fourth figure comes from the agency’s own model for QTS, sent to the school district in May 2023. It projected $20.4 million of increment from QTS’s first phase over 20 years, $1.28 million of it from the city’s levy, about $64,000 a year. It assumed just over $100 million of equipment; QTS now describes a $6 billion campus. That difference in assumptions may explain part of the gap between the 2023 and 2026 figures, though no official has said so on the record. The same model counted $1.6 million of energy tax to the city over 20 years, and $25,000 a year for each building that QTS pays the school district under its agreement.

On the mayor’s statement that QTS wants no incentives on its last two buildings: this page has not found a separate agreement for them, or a document saying the 2023 agreement leaves them out.

Sources: Alpine School District board packet, 11 Jul 2023 (the QTS summary and plan budget, PDF pp. 149–157); agency minutes, 18 Apr 2023; council minutes, 18 Jul 2023. Both sets of minutes are scanned images, so the site shows the meeting but not its text.

Why the city can’t tax data centers at a higher rate

Utah’s constitution requires property to be taxed at a uniform rate by value, so a city cannot set one rate for homes and another for data centers. The city’s staff have also told the council that the data center agreements bar any tax aimed only at them. In April 2026 a speaker the transcript does not identify told the council that “each of the data center agreements… have it in there contractually that we can’t change property tax only on that.” In June, the council discussed lowering the rate once data center revenue arrives, and a speaker warned that “if we drop taxes by ten dollars on the resident we drop by millions of dollars on the data center.” The transcript does not name that speaker either.

Sources: council transcript, 14 Apr 2026; council meeting, 16 Jun 2026. For the rate itself, see the Tax page.

Roads and pipes

Meta has paid for roads, water lines and a water tank, and the city has handed some of that money back as credits. The credits work through impact fees, the one-time charges a developer pays toward the water, sewer and road systems a new building relies on. When a developer pays for a piece of a system that serves more than its own land, which the law calls a system improvement, the city credits that share against the fees the developer would otherwise owe.

In 2018 city staff told the council Meta’s upfront public infrastructure would likely cost about $100 million, and that Meta would build more than its own campus needed so other businesses could locate nearby. In 2020 the council recorded what Meta had paid for the first round of work and how much would come back:

In 2022 a master infrastructure agreement had Meta repay the city up to $1,783,257: $1,158,379 for pumps, filtration and electrical work so treated cooling water can irrigate Cory Wride Park, $160,878 for a second, smaller reuse project, and up to $464,000 for two temporary city staff for up to two years.

The 2025 agreement for the expansion has Meta build about 5,700 feet of Pony Express Parkway along the east side of the new land, one half of the road’s width, with turn lanes, curb, a path and a water line with hydrants. Any part that counts as a system improvement is repaid to Meta by credits, cash, tax increment or a mix, and never twice. If Meta has credits left after it finishes building, the city pays Meta in cash out of the impact fees other builders pay in the same area until the credit is used up. Meta may also move its credits to its affiliates, to its first campus, or, with the city’s consent, to another landowner in the technology zone. The agreement requires the city to keep a running record of what Meta paid, what it was credited, and what the city repaid. That record has not been published.

Meta says it has invested “more than $50 million in local infrastructure improvements, including roads and water infrastructure.” That is the company’s figure. It may overlap with the amounts above, so don’t add the two together.

Sources: council minutes, 15 May 2018; first amendment to the development agreement, section 2, in the council packet, 7 Jul 2020; master infrastructure agreement and infrastructure order in the council packet, 19 Jul 2022; development agreement, section 4.3 and exhibit B, in the council packet, 21 Oct 2025; Meta, Sep 2026.

Water

Meta’s existing buildings cool their servers with evaporated water. For its new buildings Meta says it will use a closed-loop liquid system with dry cooling, with “no operational water use in the cooling system”, and water only for everyday building use, fire protection and equipment maintenance. QTS describes its campus as a closed loop too. The water the city has committed by contract:

The city agreed in 2018 to keep Meta’s monthly use confidential, but Meta publishes a yearly figure for the campus:

The city now treats Meta’s used cooling water and irrigates Cory Wride Park with it. The city puts the filtration and pumping at about $5 million without saying who paid; the agreements show Meta paying for parts of it (see Roads and pipes). A report Meta commissioned credits the park project with saving 6.3 million gallons of drinking water a year, about 19 acre-feet. Meta also says its restoration projects on Hobble Creek and the Provo River return 726 million gallons a year to those streams. Those are elsewhere in the county and do not return water to the city’s system. Both are the company’s figures; nobody has audited them.

The city’s water bill came first

In 2008 the council agreed to buy water from the Central Utah Water Conservancy District in steps, so that by 2019 the city would be committed to take 2,500 acre-feet a year. In 2012 the city’s rate consultant modeled what that could cost residents once the water was taken in full: with low growth, about $250 per connection a month; with expected growth, a $45 fee; with expected growth and an industrial user, closer to a $2 increase. Those were model scenarios, written six years before Meta arrived, and no resident was billed them. Meta’s own water agreement calls its first purchase water from that district’s project.

Sources: council minutes, 21 Oct 2025; 15 Jun 2021; 6 Jun 2023; council minutes of 2 May 2023 (scanned); QTS; Salt Lake Tribune via Grist, 21 Jan 2026; Eagle Mountain City; Meta, Sep 2026; Meta 2025 Environmental Data Index (p. 9, withdrawal by facility); Meta volumetric water benefits report, Aug 2025 (p. 14); first amendment to the water and sewer agreement in the council packet, 7 Jul 2020; council minutes, 16 Sep 2008 (PDF p. 194); council minutes, 20 Mar 2012 (PDF p. 42).

Power

Electricity has held up the projects here. Both large campuses told the city that Rocky Mountain Power could not deliver what they needed when they needed it.

• QTS, February 2025. The utility’s earlier assurances “no longer appear to be the case,” so the council amended QTS’s agreement to allow a gas plant on site: about 20 acres and 200 MW, replacing 310 planned backup diesel generators. The vote was 5–0. QTS later said it had secured grid power.
• Meta, October 2025. Meta’s representative told the Planning Commission it was “not able to get the amount of energy they need from Rocky Mountain Power” and that “on-site generation will be required.”
• Williams, March 2026. The council approved the 286 MW gas plant 5–0, on four conditions: simple-cycle gas turbines only, on the Meta parcel only, running within five years, and trees along Pony Express Parkway.

The gas plant sits outside the Sweetwater #4 rebate area, so its property tax goes to the taxing bodies in full. Unified Fire’s board was told in November 2025 that the plant alone could be worth about $350 million on the tax rolls. That is a projection; the plant is not built.

Meta says the campus’s electricity use “is matched with 100% clean and renewable energy”, and that it has added more than 1.7 gigawatts of clean power and 600 megawatt-hours of batteries at 13 sites in Utah. Matched means Meta pays for that much clean power to be added to the grid somewhere, while the campus draws whatever the grid delivers. The expansion will also run on the gas plant.

S.B. 132 (2025) lets a customer expecting 100 MW or more sign a contract the Public Service Commission must find does not shift costs onto other customers, or build its own generation off the grid. Rocky Mountain Power is also building a 345-kilovolt line from Spanish Fork to its Mercer substation in Eagle Mountain, citing load growth in general. No document found for this page shows data centers raising Eagle Mountain residents’ electricity rates; the commission’s 2025 rate order points to wildfire costs.

Sources: council minutes, 4 Feb 2025; Planning Commission minutes, 14 Oct 2025; council minutes, 3 Mar 2026; legislative policy brief; PSC docket 25-035-53; Utah News Dispatch, 29 Apr 2025; Unified Fire Service Area board minutes, 18 Nov 2025; Meta, Sep 2026.

Heat

At the 18 August budget hearing, a resident told the council that “according to that professor, I think it’s Utah State,” data centers will “rise the heat of the land around it and the water”. Nearly all the electricity a data center uses leaves it as heat, so the question is how much of that warms the air next door, and how far it reaches. Three pieces of research are behind most of what is said about it. None of them measured Eagle Mountain.

• The professor. Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, was speaking about the Stratos project proposed for Hansel Valley in Box Elder County: a planned 9 gigawatts with its own gas power plant in the same valley. The Salt Lake Tribune reported his “back-of-the-envelope calculations” that the heat could raise local temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit during the day and up to 28 at night. The figures are for that project and that valley; he has not published one for Eagle Mountain.
• The only direct measurement. Arizona State University researchers drove temperature sensors upwind and downwind of four Phoenix-area data centers, from 36 to 169 megawatts, in summer and autumn 2025. Downwind air averaged 1.3 to 1.6°F warmer and reached 4°F warmer, and the effect could be detected about a third of a mile away. The study is peer-reviewed. The facilities it measured are cooled by air-cooled condenser arrays, which blow out air 14 to 25°F above the outside temperature.
• The global satellite study. A Cambridge-led preprint compared satellite readings of ground temperature around thousands of data centers before and after they opened, and reported an average rise of 2°C (3.6°F). It measures the ground surface, not the air, and has not been peer-reviewed. Critics, including the Uptime Institute, say concrete roofs and parking lots on land that was once fields would warm the surface that much on their own, so the study does not show how much comes from the servers themselves.

What this means for Eagle Mountain is not yet known. The cooling method matters: Meta’s existing buildings cool with evaporated water, which carries much of the heat away as vapor, while its new buildings will use dry cooling, closer to the Phoenix sites. QTS says its campus is not water-cooled. This page has found no temperature measurement taken around any of the Eagle Mountain campuses, and no council member or city staff member has raised the question in a meeting transcript this site holds.

Sources: council transcript, 18 Aug 2026 (about 2:00:00); Salt Lake Tribune, 7 May 2026; ASU News, 18 May 2026; Sailor et al., ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities; Marinoni et al., arXiv preprint, 2026; Uptime Institute, 20 Aug 2026.

Where people stand

Both cases, as people have made them at the microphone.

Two figures from the hearings, checked

At the 6 August hearing a resident said Facebook received “$150 million in property tax incentives” in 2018 and Meta another “$77 million” in 2021. The first matches the Deseret News estimate at the time for Meta’s first phase. It was a projection, not an audited sum, and later phases add to it. The second matches what the 2021 reinvestment area requested, but that area is the Curleybird deal, not Meta’s.

Sources: council transcript, 6 Aug 2026; Deseret News, 21 May 2018; Cedar Valley Sentinel, 2021.

Every vote

The main actions on data centers by the City Council, the Planning Commission and the redevelopment agency board (RDA), from the city’s minutes. The Planning Commission recommends and the council decides. Votes are given as the minutes record them.

What the record doesn’t settle

Some answers are missing because the agreements keep them private. Meta’s agreements let it mark business information as confidential, and the 2025 development agreement treats all of Meta’s building plans that way. When someone asks the city for records about the project, the city must tell Meta within two business days and wait at least ten more before releasing anything, so Meta can go to court to stop it, at Meta’s own cost. Utah’s public records law still decides what the city releases.

• How many phases Meta’s first area has now. The county’s last report, for tax year 2023, shows two. Nothing on file says whether the three buildings announced in September 2026 fall in the first area or the expansion.
• When the expansion’s clock starts. The agency chooses the year the first Sweetwater #4 phase begins, and its 40 years run from there. No notice of that has been published.
• What the agency has paid Meta. Utah County’s report shows the increment sent to the agency, not what the agency paid out. This page has not found a year-by-year record of rebates paid to Meta.
• The credits ledger. The 2025 agreement requires the city to keep a record of what Meta paid for roads and pipes, the credits it received and what the city repaid. It has not been published, and this page has not found a public total of the credits since 2018.
• The expansion’s energy tax forecast. The agency’s November 2025 plan projected $45.6 million of energy tax to the city over 40 years. The amended January 2026 plan projects $546.6 million, almost exactly twelve times as much, and nothing in the packet explains the change. The larger figure drives the plan’s claim of a $555.9 million net benefit to the city; the November plan put it at $54.8 million.
• The county fee “returned to Meta”. The plan’s budget labels the county’s 1.5% fee, about $11.7 million, “Returned to Meta”. The county’s amended agreement says the county keeps its fee. The record does not explain the label.
• Meta’s energy tax rebate. The 2021 minutes say 100%; Tract’s 2024 comparison says 50%. The 2025 agreement uses a different rule for the expansion.
• What has been paid since 2023. No meeting has reported actual increment collected or rebated after tax year 2023, and Utah County has not posted a newer Report 700 for the city.
• Who Curleybird is. The circumstances point to Google: the timing, the acreage, the rebate rate and the mayor’s remarks. No document says so.
• The QTS revenue figures. The 2023 and 2026 figures above differ by a factor of about twenty, and no one has explained the gap on the record.
• Whether the campuses warm the air around them. No one has published a temperature measurement near any Eagle Mountain data center. The research on heat is summarized under Heat.
• Meta’s monthly water use. It is confidential under the 2018 agreement. Meta’s yearly totals are its own figures, not the city’s meter readings.

A document that settles any of these is worth sending to civicrollcall@gmail.com, as is any error on this page. Each correction will be noted here.

Page compiled 1 October 2026 from minutes through 22 September 2026. Updated 5 October 2026 with the Sweetwater #4 plan, budget and participation agreement, the 2020, 2022 and 2025 infrastructure terms, the school district’s 2023 analysis of QTS, Meta’s published water figures, and the city’s 2008 and 2012 water records. Updated 6 October 2026 with the research on heat.