Project dossier · Cedar Rapids (Linn County), Iowa

QTS Cedar Rapids Data Center Campus Approved

QTS (a Blackstone portfolio company) is building a seven-building campus on 612 acres of Alliant Energy's Big Cedar Industrial Center; the Cedar Rapids City Council approved the development agreement with QTS Cedar Rapids LLC on 2025-01-28 with a minimum $750M investment, later announced by QTS as a $10B campus. The agreement includes up to $18M over 20 years to a Community Betterment Fund, tax increment financing rebates, and water-free cooling; the development agreement requires construction to begin within three years and finish within six.

Key facts

Operator
QTS Data Centers
Owner
Blackstone
Filing LLC
QTS Cedar Rapids LLC
Size
612 ac
Location
Cedar Rapids (Linn County), Iowa
First proposed
2025-02-12
Decided
2025-01-28
Stage today
Approved

Source
read 2026-08-14

What to do next

Next step: Approved — pivot from stopping it to a binding CBA: enforceable caps on noise, water and cost, plus a community benefit.

Build an action pack for this project →

What has happened so far (3 events)

  • 2025-01-28vote
    Cedar Rapids City Council approved a development agreement with QTS Cedar Rapids LLC for a minimum $750 million data center on 612 acres of the Big Cedar Industrial Center. · source
  • 2025-02-12announcement
    The City of Cedar Rapids, Alliant Energy and QTS announced the data center campus, described by the mayor as the largest economic development investment in the city's history. · source
  • 2025-08-08announcement
    QTS announced the Cedar Rapids campus as a $10 billion, seven-building development with water-free cooling and carbon-free energy sourcing in partnership with Alliant Energy. · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (0 filed · 12 places to look)

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

  • EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 41.980, -91.670 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
  • EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
  • EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Around here

Other tracked projects in Iowa

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “QTS Cedar Rapids Data Center Campus”, aigridwatch.com/projects/qts-cedar-rapids-ia, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).

Toolkit States Tracker Search