A new data center development could be coming to the city of Conway in Arkansas.
First reported by Arkansas Business and Citizen Portal, the Conway City Council recently approved a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with ForgeLight Ventures, LLC, for a planned data center.The unnamed company aims to invest $1 billion in developing a 300,000 sq ft (27,870 sqm) data center building and ancillary support buildings. Further phases of development are possible in the future.
Further details are yet to be shared on the project.
Conway, in Faulkner County, is located some 30 miles north of Little Rock. The facility will be located along Lollie Road, close to Conway Municipal Airport.
The data center would represent the largest capital investment in Conway’s history, according to Jamie Gates, executive vice president of the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce/Conway Development Corp. “This project is at a historic scale for us,” he said.
Under the MoU, the project would create around 50 new jobs. In exchange, the project will be granted a 65 percent tax abatement for 30 years.
For its cooling water, the project may use treated water from the Tupelo Bayou Wastewater Treatment Plant – though this isn’t confirmed yet.
The company behind the ForgeLight affiliate is not known at this point, though was said to be a US-based Fortune 100 company – which likely suggests it could be one of the large hyperscale developers. Gates said that local officials and economic developers began discussions with the mystery company about a year ago, and the project remains in the “very early stage.”
Arkansas has a small data center market, and none of the US hyperscalers currently have developments in the region. Local ISPs Brightspeed and Windstream have facilities in the state. TierPoint is also present in Little Rock. Acxiom Corporation has a site in Conway.
