Novva Inc., a new Utah company, has begun construction on a 1.5-million-square-foot, $1 billion data center in West Jordan. The company said that the project's fi rst phase will begin locating clients in the building early next year.

Novva Inc., a new company launched with the backing of Los Angeles real estate investing firm CIM Group, has announced plans to develop Utah’s largest hyperscale data center campus. Located in West Jordan, the campus will be the state’s largest purpose-built, multi-tenant campus for enterprise clients. Novva will invest over $1 billion over the next several years, the company said in a release. The project will build out in four phases, totaling over 1.5 million square feet of data center space.

The first phase, currently under construction, consists of a substation, a 300,000-square-foot data center hall and an additional 80,000 square feet for the new company’s headquarters. The data center will be available for client deployments in early 2021, Novva said.

Novva intends to target proximate and non-proximate clients, primarily competing for clients in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Oregon. Wes Swenson, a veteran in the tech arena and the former CEO of C7 Data Centers is the founder and CEO of Novva. C7 was acquired by DataBank in 2017.

“The facilities are state-of-the-art, imaginatively engineered, purpose-designed and built and of such scale that it will accommodate 250-kilowatt clients to 30-megawatt clients,” said Swenson.

Swenson said that Novva’s data centers will allow for autonomous client custom suites, optional turn-key, as well as secure multi-tenant services. Novva has designed and engineered the facilities to operate without water year-round, to utilize solar energy and cool with ambient air, keeping sustainability at the forefront. In addition, the facilities allow for short-cycle demand builds; carrier-neutral, flexible power designs; and a revolutionary downward-flow hot air containment system.

“We believe Utah is a hidden gem for one of the large-set wholesale colocation campuses in the United States,” said Swenson. Some of its attributes include low-cost power, low-disaster risk, low latency, dense long-haul fiber, high-altitude cold desert, central western U.S. location, an expanding international airport and no sales tax on equipment purchases. “We can offer our clients some of the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry, located in a strategic part of the U.S. for both hub- and edge-compute, while offering unparalleled service.”

CIM is a community-focused real estate and infrastructure owner, operator, lender and developer founded in 1994. It has delivered more than $60 billion in real estate and infrastructure projects.