The push for Millard County to house the world’s largest data center campus took another step forward last week when Creekstone Energy announced the closure of its Series B funding round to advance its potential data center campus.
Salt Lake City-based Creekstone Energy reported the funding round was led by Trident Ridge, with participation from Pelion Ventures, Utah’s largest venture capital firm.
A spokesman at Creekstone Energy declined to disclose the exact financial details of the funding round.
“This financing marks a pivotal milestone in our mission to build the world’s most efficient, AI-optimized energy and data infrastructure,” Buford Ray Conley, CEO at Creekstone Energy, said in a statement. “With Trident Ridge returning as our lead investor and Pelion Ventures joining our vision, Creekstone is positioned to deliver scalable, low-carbon power and compute capacity at unprecedented scale.”
Located southeast of Delta, the 20-million-square-foot campus is being called the Delta Gigasite. Its size would easily position it as the world’s largest data center campus, coming in well ahead of Hohhot, China’s Telecom Inner Mongolia Information Park, which covers over 10 million square feet.
A previous release from Creekstone Energy said that over the coming decade, the company plans to manage 10 gigawatts of capacity at the site from three primary sources, drawing 1.8 gigawatts from the Intermountain Power Project, 6 gigawatts from solar and 2 gigawatts from natural gas, while also considering geothermal, wind and nuclear energy as potential future additions.
Proponents of the project say it will position Utah as a national hub for artificial-intelligence infrastructure, sustainable power and industrial innovation.
“Creekstone Energy is combining energy innovation with data center expertise to solve one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks — reliable, scalable power,” Sander Gossard, partner at Trident Ridge, said in a statement. “We’re backing a team redefining U.S. AI infrastructure to strengthen both economic resilience and national security.”
With Creekstone’s zoning proposal and conditional use permit receiving unanimous approval from the Millard County Commission, the energy company is touting strong local backing for what it says is a project expected to bring substantial tax revenue to the area, along with preserving existing jobs and creating new employment opportunities in Delta.
Speaking during a June Millard County Commission meeting, county resident Ron Larsen expressed his support for the project coming into the county.
“I’m in favor (of) the benefit that can come to the county from this type of development,” Larsen said. “I think we ought to move forward with it.”
Alternatively, Jarvis Jones spoke at the same meeting in opposition to the company’s now-approved request to rezone nearly 1,200 acres of property from agricultural land to heavy industrial land for its potential campus.
“This land is currently zoned agricultural for a reason,” Jones said. “It’s an area surrounded by open space, family farms and rural homes. Changing it to heavy industrial use isn’t just a zoning decision; it’s a permanent shift in how this land and the land around it will be treated for generations to come.”
Speaking more specifically to data centers, Jones worried about the “ecological cost.”
“We’re looking at an operation with a massive environmental footprint. These centers use a huge amount of electricity, water and land. They produce constant heat, potential noise and require a significant infrastructure support. These impacts are incompatible with the surrounding natural environment and current land use,” Jones said.