JP Morgan, Starwood Property Loan $2B for 175MW Utah Data Center

CIM Group and Novva Data Centers have secured a $2 billion construction financing package from J.P. Morgan and Starwood Property Trust to finish off Novva’s flagship 175MW Salt Lake City data center.

Founded in 2019 by CIM Group and Novva’s management team, the new loan, with J.P. Morgan as lead arranger and Starwood Property Trust as arranger, is set to fund the second and third phases of the 100-acre campus in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan, UT, pushing it to a total of one million square feet by 2026. Phase one began operations in 2023, while Phases two and three—each a 318,000-square-foot, 72MW data center—started construction in December 2023 and January 2024, respectively.

The data center is one of the world’s largest direct-to-chip cooled artificial intelligence facilities, designed to handle the compute demands of AI with a waterless cooling system that slashes usage by about 84% compared to regional peers, per CIM’s estimates.

“As demand for AI and data center capacity grows, we believe Novva continues to be strongly positioned as one of the most innovative and fastest-growing data center companies in the U.S. developing sustainable, highly efficient data centers at low cost,” said Avi Shemesh, co-founder and principal, CIM Group.

In addition to its Salt Lake City campus, Novva also operates data centers in Colorado Springs and Las Vegas, and is in the process of building data centers in Reno, San Francisco and Mesa, AZ.