Novva has been officially confirmed as the company behind the proposed Project Borealis data center campus in Phoenix, Arizona, and has tweaked the design slightly from previous iterations.
As reported by BizJournal, Novva Data Centers is getting public feedback for its first Arizona project in Mesa, Maricopa County.
Update: Novva has since officially announced the project, saying the campus will total 300MW. The first 96MW phase will launch in late 2026. It will use HVO to power the backup generators.
The company put its plans for ‘Project Borealis’ before the Mesa Design Review Board last week.
The proposals would see five data centers, each totaling 225,585 sq ft (20,960 sqm), built on land bordering East Warner Road, South Ellsworth Road, Warner Road, and Ellsworth Road.
"We're excited to announce our intention to make Mesa the home of Novva's sixth data center. Because all of our data centers are strategically located in the West, we are fortunate to bring the best of what we've learned from our previous projects to this new Arizona data center," Wes Swenson, CEO of Novva Data Centers, said in a statement to BJ.
He continued: "This includes sustainable practices that will conserve local resources, innovative technologies that will help our data center run as efficiently as possible, and cutting-edge infrastructure that will make these data centers unlike any other in the region."
Novva told BJ it expects the first data center to be complete in late 2026.
The company said the campus will support high-density deployments designed for direct-to-chip cooling applications, with liquid cooling and air-cooling systems.
Novva was launched in 2020 by former C7 CEO Wes Swenson with $95 million from CIM. The company has data centers in operation or development in West Jordan, Utah; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada; and San Francisco, California.
The company acquired 165 acres of land in Mesa at auction last year for $62.7 million. Swenson was the sole bidder for the parcel.
An unnamed company filed a pre-submittal application with the City of Mesa for a data center campus known as ‘Project Borealis’ shortly afterward.
At the time, the filing suggested six buildings in a different orientation to the one now proposed.
Though Novva wasn’t officially named on last year’s application, it was widely assumed to be Novva based on the location, land parcel size, and the fact the land was acquired at auction.
Phoenix is a major data center hub, with the Mesa area home to Polish software firm Comarch, EdgeCore, Meta, Google, and NTT. Across the rest of Phoenix, the likes of Stack, Stream, Prime, Aligned, Iron Mountain, Vantage, Compass, QTS, EdgeConneX, Expedient, Centersquare, and H5 are all present. Microsoft operates a cloud region out of the area.
