This story appears in the November 2025 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
Each of Utah’s 29 counties offers unique advantages for businesses and talent alike. Let’s visit Millard County.
In 1855, Utah’s territorial legislature met for the first time in the capital city: Fillmore, Utah. Four years earlier, Gov. Brigham Young had visited the area and personally selected the valley and site of the town. Citizens quickly colonized the area, building homes, mills and commerce. The next year, the legislature voted to relocate operations north, with Great Salt Lake City as the capital we know today. While Fillmore remains the Millard County seat, losing “capital city” recognition shifted the economy from high-density typical businesses to rural Utah’s heavy hitters — mining, agriculture, construction, transportation and manufacturing.
Today, the benefits of that shift have never been greater: The Millard County Commission has approved two rezoning requests, allowing Creekstone Energy and Joule Capital Partners to both start construction on their campuses after conditional use permits are finalized. Millard County will soon be home to two of the largest and most advanced data center campuses in the world.
Here’s the deal with data centers
At 6,572.42 square miles, Millard County is the third-largest Utah county by land area. Combined, the two new campuses will use up about 8 square miles. According to Millard County Commissioner Bill Wright, these data centers provide the best bang for the county’s buck.
“The data centers are probably the best way for us to get development, rather than a business that brings 500 people [for whom] we will have to build houses, schools and everything else,” he says, explaining that the two new data centers will provide their own power, water, infrastructure and even security. “These data centers will generally not impact our basic operation.”
The commission expects population increases to support construction efforts for a few years, but in the long term, the biggest change will be an influx of tax revenue for the county. And Wright already knows how he’d like to spend it.
“I have no [intention of building a] big kingdom,” he says. “We’re going to take the property tax we receive, take care of our normal increases … and put as much money as we can back to lower property taxes.”
Keeping the peace
As of 2023, 13,437 people call Millard County home. With a development this large, some residents worry that precious resources, like power and water, might become more scarce or expensive, or that construction and operation will disturb the area’s natural tranquility.
Vicki Lyman, a Millard County commissioner, says all fears can be put to rest. The data centers won’t be tapping into the local grid for energy; instead, she says, they will use generators. A press release announcing the Joule Capital project explains that Caterpillar’s latest G3520K generator will provide 1.1 gigawatt hours of grid-forming battery energy storage, along with backup power generation served by diverse fuel sources.
Wright says both operations sit on natural gas lines that can power generators, and that a huge draw for companies to come to Millard County is its variety of power options.
“I don’t think there’s another county in the United States that has the potential to produce power from six different resources,” he says. “Right here in our county … we have geothermal, solar, a little bit of wind, coal, gas … and nuclear on the horizon.”
For Joule, the Millard location was chosen based on personal familiarity with the land. Mark McDougal, a partner at Joule Capital Partners, is a part-owner of the farmland that was rezoned for the project.
Both commissioners reiterated that the county did not give either development any special treatment or incentives to bring the historic data centers to the area. “There’s a tremendous amount of resources here, and it kind of sets me back when I see everybody wanting to take credit,” Wright says. “We can give the Lord credit. It’s not me; it’s not the state. They came of their own free will and choice.”
Statewide success
In a recent interview with Utah Business, Packsize Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer Troy Rydman explained that “AI’s growth doesn’t just require better software. It needs energy-efficient processors, stable power grids and secure, scalable data centers to handle the load.”
As the Joule campus is set to launch with capacity by 2026 and Creekstone is already taking on a 50 megawatt agreement with BluSky AI, these new developments join a broader trend in Utah’s ecosystem and are a signal that Utah has the space and is developing the resources to support businesses in this sector.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the Creekstone campus alone could generate as much as $40 billion in economic activity for the area.
For Wright, he’d happily take on several more campuses. “If we’re going to change, I love data centers compared to everything else.”