The Ankeny City Council voted Monday to approve a development agreement for the construction of a 105,000-square-foot multi-tenant data center on the city’s southeast side.

The data center will be built by Edged Des Moines LLC, who acquired the 17½-acre parcel at Southeast 90th Street and Southeast Four Mile Road, just north of Interstate 80, for $3.7 million in late 2024. The development agreement includes an incentive of a five-year sliding scale tax increment finance package not to exceed $2 million, and the creation of 22 jobs that pay between $29.76 and $35.71 an hour.

Construction is expected to begin in late spring or summer of this year and be ready for customers by the end of 2026.

Mitch Fonseca, chief operating officer for Edged, said Ankeny and Iowa are attractive places to build a data center because they are strategically located in the country and are known for having affordable, renewable power, a skilled workforce and a high level of fiber connectivity.

“So it ends up being a very good location, and the broader Des Moines area [is] becoming a fast-growing data center market over the last five years, so it’s really started to grow significantly,” he told the Business Record before Monday’s meeting. “Iowa has seen a ton of development which is being driven by cheap power, which is a huge factor, skilled labor is a huge factor, and fiber connectivity is also helpful.”

The planned data center in Ankeny is the first in Iowa for Edged. Fonseca didn’t rule out future growth in the state but declined to say where the company might build future data centers.

“It’ll be the first in Iowa and it will have a couple of siblings fairly shortly,” he said. “We’re starting to expand fairly quickly into the Iowa market.”

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