A Meta subsidiary’s plan for an $800 million data center project in Davenport will receive a $161 million local property tax exemption through the state’s High Quality Jobs Program.

The Iowa Economic Development Authority board voted Friday to approve the tax exemption request of 60% over 20 years from the city of Davenport which had already approved the incentives, according to a project summary from IEDA. The project summary is in the IEDA board packet, available here.

Vemerald LLC, the Meta Platforms Inc. affiliate company, told state and local officials that the project will create 35 jobs at $28.76 per hour and plans to break ground in the first quarter of 2025.

The IEDA report says construction is scheduled to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2027.

The data center’s operations will involve storage and transfer of “large amounts of transactional data, including but not limited to, user and customer data,” the project summary says. The Meta campus in Davenport will have, in addition to the main buildings, ancillary buildings and support areas for office space, servers and support equipment.

Meta – which operates social media and global communications platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp – has been expanding its data center presence in Iowa since 2013 when it announced its complex in Altoona near Interstate 80.

The five million-square-foot facility is considered the world’s largest data center, according to the city of Altoona’s economic development webpage.

Meta subsidiary Siculus LLC was previously awarded a local property tax exemption through the High Quality Jobs program in May 2019 for a $400 million capital investment in the Altoona data center project, IEDA records show.

Iowa has become a Midwest hub for data center construction activity over the last decade. In addition to Meta, Apple Inc. has built up data center infrastructure in Waukee and Microsoft has built in West Des Moines.