Joule Power AI Data Center Campus, Millard County, Utah

Joule's data center campus sits on 4,000 acres in rural Millard County, Utah. The land belongs to the family of co-founder Mark McDougal, who has farmed it for decades. The company, Joule Capital Partners, is based in Lehi and run by McDougal and David Gray. Millard County commissioners unanimously approved a conditional use permit for the project in August 2025. Joule broke ground on the site on Thursday, November 6, 2025.

The first phase alone is 1.3 gigawatts, McDougal and Gray told the Deseret News. McDougal said the campus would generate as much power as the entire Wasatch Front consumes. The company says it will generate its own electricity on site and will not draw power from the local utility grid. Gray said the family's decades-old water rights mean the project needs no new water allocation, and that it will use closed-loop cooling instead of evaporative cooling. "You can't have a neighborhood with a farm underneath it," Gray said. "We want to be wise stewards of the resources we have been given." "All of our generators are in the same area as our data center," McDougal said, adding that because the power use of large computing jobs rises and falls, "we can match the demand to the load." Emy Lesofski, director of the Utah Office of Energy Development, called the project's vision "commendable."

Millard County held eight public hearings on Joule and a second nearby project, Creekstone, before commissioners signed off, according to KUTV. Critics told the station, in a report published June 3, 2026, that no environmental studies had been done before thousands of acres of farmland were approved for industrial use. "It feels that there's just a few of us that are screaming into the void," said Amanda Fahey, a Fillmore resident who has criticized the project. Commissioner Bill Wright told KUTV, "I'm not pushing data centers. The reason they're here is they have a right." At the November groundbreaking, Wright told the crowd, "I have a plan that every citizen will benefit from them being here." At the August commission meeting one resident, who said he moved to Millard County to avoid industrial zones, said: "We'd like to try and preserve that as much as we can." The county sheriff's office raised concerns about heavier traffic on rural roads used by children and animals.