Eagle Mountain’s data centers

The four campuses, and a power plant

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. Where the record ties the two together the card says so; where it does not, the card says that too.

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

None of the data centers received a flat tax exemption. The city used a community reinvestment area, a tool Utah law gives cities to attract development. It works in four steps:

1. The city draws a boundary around the land and records what the land was worth before anything was built.
2. The data center pays its full property tax bill to Utah County like any owner.
3. The tax on the new value, called the increment, goes to the city’s redevelopment agency instead of to the city, school district, county and water district.
4. The agency pays an agreed share of that increment back to the company, for 20 years from each phase, inside an area that can last up to 40 years.

Each taxing body signs off on its own share. The school district collects the largest part of a property tax bill, so it gives up the most and negotiates hardest.

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.

Twenty years per phase, not forty

The 40-year figure that circulates is the outer limit of the area, not the length of any one rebate. Each phase gets 20 years from the year its value first shows up. Utah County’s own tax report for the Meta areas shows the first phase’s increment running 2021 to 2040 and the second 2023 to 2042. Later Meta phases would start their own 20 years.

Source: Utah County Auditor, 2023 Report 700 for Eagle Mountain.

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). QTS gets no energy-tax rebate, according to Tract’s 2024 comparison.

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

This is the question residents ask most, and the record answers only part of it.

Meta

Stadion, LLC is the largest property taxpayer on the city’s list, at $305.4 million of taxable value in fiscal 2024. In tax year 2023 the two Meta areas produced about $9.7 million of increment, all of it sent to the redevelopment agency under the agreement, which then pays most of it back to Meta at the rates in the table above. 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.

QTS: three 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.”

Sources: 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.

Water

Early data centers cooled their servers with evaporated water. The newer ones in Eagle Mountain say they use closed loops that fill once and recirculate. The water the city has committed by contract:

How much Meta draws is not public. The city agreed in 2018 to keep Meta’s monthly use confidential; the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Meta withdrew more than 35 million gallons in 2024, about 107 acre-feet. The city now treats Meta’s used cooling water and irrigates Cory Wride Park with it, after spending about $5 million on treatment and pumping. Meta says its Utah County restoration projects return 726 million gallons a year to local watersheds; nobody has audited that figure.

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.

Power

Electricity, not land or water, is what has slowed 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.

State law shapes how this works. 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.

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

• The original Meta deal. The 2018 agreements came before the minutes this site collects, which start in 2019. The rebate rates above for Meta come from news reports at the time.
• The terms of Meta’s 2025 expansion. The agency approved the Sweetwater #4 participation agreement in December 2025 and adjusted the school and water districts’ shares in January 2026. Neither set of minutes states the rates.
• 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.
• Meta’s water use. It is confidential under the 2018 agreement.

A document that settles any of these is worth sending to civicrollcall@gmail.com, as is any error on this page. Corrections are noted here, not made silently.

Page compiled 1 October 2026 from minutes through 22 September 2026.