07/21/2026
Worldwide company has eye on data center plan for Grant County
By Byron Tate
EdgeConnex, a global data center developer and operator, has been identified as a possible developer of a proposed data center in Grant County that is valued at between $8 billion and $12 billion.
County Judge Randy Pruitt made the announcement on Monday night at the Grant County Quorum Court meeting. The county has been dealing with Clean Cloud Energy, an Austin, Texas-based company that has been working to secure an end user. Pruitt said Clean Cloud told him in late June that EdgeConnex had signed a letter of intent but that he had been asked to keep the name quiet.
“That was fine, but I told them that if someone asked me, I wasn’t going to lie and say I didn’t know anything,” he said. “No one had asked me anything about it until Monday. At the Quorum Court meeting, I was asked directly and I told them what I knew.”
According to its website, EdgeConnex, which has headquarters in Northern Virginia, Singapore, and Amsterdam, has 90 data centers in 20 countries spread across four continents. The company’s letter of intent gives it 120 days to do its due diligence with an option for another 30 days, Pruitt said.
“They are truly the real deal,” Pruitt said. “But we have not negotiated with them at this point; it’s just too early for that.”
Pruitt said he was aware EdgeConnex representatives had come to Grant County to look at the potential site and that it had begun to conduct some environmental tests.
“Clean Cloud said they had not sold the project, but that EdgeConnex was a potential buyer,” Pruitt said. “They did give them the list of our conditions, and according to Clean Cloud, they didn’t blink. But we haven’t had that discussion with them.”
Pruitt said last month he had pulled together some members of the community to help him create a framework for how he would deal with a potential end-user, particularly when it came to how to handle requests from the company to forgive as much as 65% of the property taxes associated with the construction of a multi-million-dollar data center. While other communities have appeared to be steamrolled by big data center companies coming to their town, Grant County has made public what it will cost those companies to locate there.
“We don’t want to see it, hear it or smell it,” Justice of the Peace Mike Nevens, one of the advisers to the judge, told The Headlight last month. “We don’t want it to ruin our water table, we don’t want it to raise electric rates for our citizens, and we don’t want it to ruin our internet. If a company can comply with all of those requirements, they will be considered for a 20% tax abatement.”
To get from there to a 65% tax abatement, Pruitt said the end user will have to pay up front close to $57 million in a one-time lump sum payment to the county, with the money spread across a variety of services, ranging from nonprofits to schools to fire departments. One line item for $7.5 million would be used to knock off $1,000 in taxes for each property owner in the county.
Each year afterward, the county would collect its 35% in taxes – between $25.2 million and close to $38 million, depending on the size of the project – and an additional $12.4 million each year, most of which would be used to pay for the tax refund for property owners.
Clean Cloud has said that it was looking for one of the bigger companies – such as Meta, Oracle, Google and others – but Pruitt said EdgeConneX will be the one to find that company.
“Delivering innovative and proximate data center solutions ranging from 40kW to 500MW or more, we work closely with our customers to provide the scalable capacity, power, and connectivity they need to meet their business’s and end users’ growing demands,” stated EdgeConnex’s website.
Clean Cloud said a year ago that it wanted to develop plans for a 500 megawatt data center in Grant County, but the plans grew to 800 megawatts after the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. was able to locate additional providers of electricity.
The proposal for a data center in Grant County has at times become an emotional topic for many in the Sheridan area, where the data center would likely be located. Data centers use inordinate amounts of electricity and, depending on the design, water, and elected officials in some areas have signed nondisclosure agreements to avoid being transparent about what is being planned, leaving the public distrustful and in the dark.
But no public official in Grant County has signed an NDA for this project, according to Pruitt. The “closed-loop” cooling system uses about as much water per year as a handful of average-sized homes. And electric company officials have said the data center being proposed would not be the cause of a rate increase.
In 2020, EdgeConneX was acquired by EQT Infrastructure, described as one of the world’s largest infrastructure investors, “giving the company access to additional capital for expansion, investment in land and power, and Build-To-Suit projects worldwide,” according to the EdgeConnex website. “This solid backing has enabled EdgeConneX to complete a number of key business initiatives, including the establishment of AdaniConneX, a joint venture with Adani Enterprises in India, strategic investment in China-based data center provider, Chayora, the opening of Barcelona and Brussels, acquisitions of data centers in Israel and Indonesia, and the announcement of a new data center development in Japan.”
EdgeConnex’s association with a Chinese-based company could be problematic in Arkansas, which now has laws on the books limiting how such companies can operate in the state. Plaintiffs, however, have taken the state to federal court over the laws, and the case is still pending.
