Caterpillar Among Groups Working on Massive Utah Data Center Campus

Three groups active in the industrial infrastructure space have announced a collaboration that would create the largest data center campus in Utah and provide gigawatts of new power generation capacity to the state.

Infrastructure company Joule Capital Partners, along with Caterpillar Inc., and Wheeler Machinery Co. on August 7 said they have an agreement to power Joule’s High Performance Compute Data Center Campus in Utah. Joule has said it wants to create the largest single campus in Utah, along with a goal to operate the most advanced data centers in the world.

Joule said the campus in central Utah would encompass about 4,000 acres, and begin operating next year. The companies on Thursday said the project would provide about 4 GW of power to the region. The groups in a news release wrote, “The project will deliver groundbreaking prime power and integrated combined cooling heat and power [CCHP] solutions with a by-design liquid cooling architecture. Powered by a fleet of Caterpillar’s latest G3520K generator sets and support equipment, the distributed generation system produces electricity and captures waste heat to power and cool next-generation, high-density server systems.”

The groups said their plan includes 1.1 GWh of grid-forming battery energy storage “along with backup power generation served by diverse fuel sources.” Caterpillar said the use of its U.S.-based manufacturing will facilitate faster construction. Along with the gensets, the fully integrated system includes the controls, switchgear, inverters, energy storage solutions, CCHP and more. Caterpillar and Wheeler said their companies also will provide service and support for the products and solutions to ensure that uptime and availability targets are met.

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“This project represents the core of Joule’s mission—to deliver artificial intelligence [AI]-ready compute capacity by pairing world-class data center campuses with reliable, on-demand power,” said David Gray, president of Joule Capital Partners. “By combining Caterpillar’s advanced energy systems with Wheeler’s local expertise, we can bring gigawatt-scale capacity to market faster and more efficiently than ever before, ensuring our tenants have the power and reliability they need to thrive in the next generation of high-performance computing.”

Melissa Busen, senior vice president of Electric Power at Caterpillar, said, “Caterpillar is uniquely positioned to tackle the growing energy needs for artificial intelligence and the evolving needs of modern infrastructure. This project is a perfect example of how we can deliver fast, reliable power generation to our customers through integrated energy solutions. We are proud to work with Joule and Wheeler to help bring this project to life.”

“This strategic alliance between Joule, Caterpillar, and Wheeler brings together world-class engineering, local expertise, and visionary energy design,” said Bryan Campbell, CEO of Wheeler Machinery, “We’re proud to help deliver a resilient solution ready to meet future compute demands and set a new standard for data center infrastructure.”

—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER.