Company expanding in Council Bluffs and building new facilities in Cedar Rapids
Google is expanding its data center footprint in Iowa, announcing plans to double its total spend in the Hawkeye State.
The search and cloud giant announced over the weekend that it is "investing an additional $7 billion in Iowa within the next two years in cloud and AI infrastructure, as well as in expanded workforce development programs, meaningfully increasing the pace of investments the company has made in the state since 2007."
The investment would be spent towards the development of both a new data center in Cedar Rapids and expansion of its existing facility in Council Bluffs.
Google is also providing funding to support a new program with the electrical training ALLIANCE (etA) to help increase the electrical workforce pipeline in Iowa by 95 percent. Local press the company is working with the Cedar Rapids Electrical Trade Center to train up 700 apprentices by 2030.
“For the past two decades, Google’s data centers, products and services have helped support Iowa’s local economies while helping businesses across the country compete globally,” Google chief investment officer Ruth Porat said on LinkedIn. “The promise of AI depends on how deeply and widely it reaches, and Google is proud to enable a new era of American innovation with its investments in technical infrastructure in Iowa and across the U.S. ”
Google has long had a presence in Iowa, with multiple buildings in Pottawattamie County’s Council Bluffs, a city on the state’s western border and close to Omaha, Nebraska. The company said it has invested some $6.8 billion in Iowa to-date.
Plans for the company’s first Council Bluffs data center were first announced in 2007 – with further expansions announced in 2012, 2015, 2023, and 2024.
According to Baxtel, Google has two data center sites in Council Bluffs, one near Lake Manawa and another Southlands campus. Baxtel reports that the Southlands Council Bluff campus has four buildings with a total of 2.9 million sq ft (270,000 sqm).
Cedar Rapids, in Linn County, is located around 120 miles east of Des Moines. It is not traditionally a large data center market.
News of a planned data center campus in Cedar Rapids surfaced last year. A company working behind the name Heaviside LLC was proposing to develop a $576 million data center campus along 76th Avenue SW and Edgewood Road SW in the Big Cedar Industrial Center.
Google was named in Iowa Economic Development Authority documents as the company behind the project in March 2024. According to authority documents, construction on the data center was set to start in Q2 2024 for a 2026 go-live date.
The full scope of Google’s plans in Cedar Rapids are unclear. Owned by Alliant Energy, the Big Cedar Industrial Center is a 1.390-acre industrial site. A brochure from the energy firm suggests the site currently has 85MW of excess capacity, with opportunities for future substations to take the whole center to 1.2GW.
Other operators present and/or developing news sites in Iowa include Edged, Apple, QTS, COPT, Microsoft, Cologix, Meta, and others.
“We are thrilled to officially welcome Google to Cedar Rapids. This investment is a once-in-a-generation opportunity that changes the game for our city. Yes, it is a data center project adding new jobs and major local investment — but the real story is the ripple effect it will have across our economy and community,” said Mayor of Cedar Rapids, Tiffany O’Donnell.
