TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — There has been a persistent mystery in Pima County Government: What is Project Blue? Now KGUN9 has the answer.
For weeks now we’ve been talking about the mysterious Project Blue set for a plot of vacant land near the Pima County Fairgrounds. Now we can lift some of that mystery. We now know it is proposed to be a large datacenter. It's supposed to bring in thousands of jobs during construction, a long list of well paying jobs once they’re actually operating and we can finally reveal the name of the company.
Regions compete to fill empty spaces with big new businesses that create jobs, pump up the economy and build the tax base. Companies often require secrecy in the early stages or you’re out of the game.
That was true of Project Blue but now Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher has put out a public memo that ID’s the company as Beale Infrastructure, a company specialized in building the data centers that store all the information out there on the internet. The "Blue" in Project Blue may come from "Blue Owl", an investment firm that is the parent company to Beale Infrastructure.
The County estimates more than three thousand direct construction jobs and about two thousand indirect jobs, across two years of construction.
Once it’s operating, the facility is expected to have about 180 employees paid an average of $64,000 a year.
The facility will be big, about 290 acres, and it will use a lot of water. It will be reclaimed water, not drinking water. The facility will build an 18 mile pipeline to handle the demand and make it large enough to provide reclaimed water for other users too.
Pima County Supervisor Matt Heinz says the company seems to be finding responsible ways to use lots of water in our desert environment.
“I think what this does is it shows that we can do this type of industry safely and well for a region that has some of the concerns that we do, like with water.”
Pima County would sell the land for the project for just under 21 million dollars. County Supervisors will consider the deal in their meeting next week.
First buildings should open in about two years with the project complete in four years.
