A pair of upcoming Mesa City Council cases could result in the annexation of more than 150 acres.Pacific Proving LLC, a prominent Mesa land owner, through law firm Gammage & Burnham PLC, filed a request for public hearings with the city to annex two parcels in Maricopa County into Mesa. Pacific Proving is looking to develop Pacific Proving Technology Campus — a large data center and employment campus — on this land, located on the northeast corner of Crismon and Pecos roads. The sites, composed of 42 and 130 acres, respectively, are located east of Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport and south of State Route 24.Council will conduct the public hearings on the annexations at its July 1 meeting.The hearings come less than a week after Pacific Proving submitted an application to Mesa’s planning and zoning department on June 25. A project narrative submitted with the application spells out details to transform the more than 170 acres into a “data center and technology employment campus.” Pacific Proving submitted a similar packet to the city of Mesa in March.The site is located about two miles from the recently approved Berge Destination at Gateway auto mall project. Council gave the thumbs up to that development at its June 17 meeting.Data center campus would include office, warehousesPacific Proving’s site plan shows the campus would include 11 buildings that span more than 2 million square feet collectively with nine of those buildings eyed for data halls or flex-use. The other two buildings would comprise a three-story, 150,000-square-foot office building and a 95,000-square-foot warehouse. An electrical substation to supply additional power is also in the proposal.”The proposed data center and technology employment campus is the “right fit” for this location and capitalizes on the significant technology infrastructure investments made in the area by the city of Mesa and Salt River Project to supply power and technology resources to the area,” the application read.Pacific Proving is being represented in its application by attorneys Susan Demmitt and Dennis Newcombe with Gammage & Burnham. Utah-based AE Urbia Architects and Engineers is also on the development team. Andrew Cohn, a principal with Pacific Proving, could not be immediately reached for comment. Separately, Mesa BA Land LLC — an entity tied to Pacific Proving LLC — sold 87 acres of adjacent land to Denmark-based DSV Air and Sea Inc. in January in a $46 million deal. DSV, a global transportation and logistics company, is planning to build a two-story, 30,000-square-foot regional corporate headquarters next to a 1.73 million-square-foot warehouse on that land. Data center growth has sped up in the Valley as other markets run out of land but some projects could be put on hold as utilities work to catch up with infrastructure.Cushman & Wakefield told the Business Journal that there were 325 megawatts of new data center capacity under construction in the Valley at the end of 2023, while another 3,215 megawatts sit in the pipeline at some stage of planning and development.Some of the big hyperscale users include Google, Meta Platforms Inc., QTS Realty Trust, and Vantage Data Centers. In 2023, Amazon submitted plans for two separate data centers totaling nearly 1 million square feet. Other players such as Dallas-based CyrusOne Inc., Virginia-based EdgeConneX and Connecticut-based Edged Energy have also filed plans to bring more than 2 million square feet of data centers to the East Valley.
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