Antelope Data Center, Cedar City, Utah

The Antelope Data Center, a 640-acre data center campus with its own natural gas power plant west of Cedar City, won a conditional use permit from the Iron County Planning Commission on June 4, 2026, in a unanimous vote. The developer is Pronghorn Development LLC, and the site is along Antelope Springs Road in unincorporated Iron County, Utah, roughly 15 miles northwest of Cedar City according to the company's application. The plan calls for five data center buildings and a gas-fired plant of up to 1.5 gigawatts, built in phases over an estimated eight to ten years. Iron County's description put the five buildings at about 1.35 million square feet. St. George News reported they could total up to 6.75 million square feet.

The developer estimates it will finish the project in 2033, with the first 500 megawatts of generation done by 2028, and says the campus will support about 680 employees. Materials presented at the March hearing put the permanent workforce at about 175, roughly 35 for each of the five data hall buildings. No end user has been named. At the March hearing Cedar City resident Camilla Dorado asked, "What tech company will be owning the data center if the data center is built?"

The fight has been over water, air and the desert itself. More than 350 residents packed Festival Hall in March for over three hours of public comment on the project. The site sits in the Beryl-Enterprise groundwater basin, where the Utah Division of Water Rights adopted a groundwater management plan in 2012 after withdrawals outran recharge; the basin is closed to new groundwater appropriations, and the property has no active water source, so the project would have to buy and transfer existing rights. The state plans to reduce water rights in the area by 31,000 acre-feet over the next 100 years. The developer's water feasibility report says the closed-loop cooling system needs a one-time fill of 8 acre-feet and that construction will use about 10 to 20 acre-feet a year. Joe News, who lives about five miles from the site, told the commission his farm supports his family and about 50 goats on about 2.25 water shares. "If I'm using one-third the amount of water that they're planning to use there, I'm very skeptical that that's actually going to work," he said. "We are being asked to permanently convert one square mile of high desert habitat into industrial infrastructure," said Angelica Gutierrez, a Cedar City resident and public lands professional. Christy Demello of Cedar City said, "I don't trust any company to regulate itself." "This is being proposed in our literal backyard," goat farmer Annette Nunes said.

At the June 4 meeting, county officials stressed that the commission's job was to decide whether the project met existing ordinances, not whether it was popular. "If the applicant meets the conditions of our current ordinance, as long as they can satisfy our ordinance, then yes, the Planning Commission has limited discretion on what they can approve or not approve," said Terry Palmer, the county's building official and zoning administrator. The permit carries 62 conditions covering water rights, wastewater, roads, wildlife, noise monitoring, dark-sky lighting, cultural resource surveys and site restoration. "This thing has more conditions of approval than probably everything that's ever gone through this commission combined," Commissioner Dennis Gray said. Planning Commission Chair Erick Cox said the project will not receive tax incentives or tax breaks. County planner Brett Hamilton said no formal request for tax incentives had been made; any request for tax increment financing, an abatement or the Utah Inland Port Authority process would need its own public review by the Iron County Commission. After the vote, a number of people in the audience held up paper plates that read "appeal". Pronghorn spokesperson Scott Cuthbertson said in a statement, "When people have access to the facts, anxiety gives way to understanding."

The Antelope application was not caught by the county's pause on new projects. On May 26 the Iron County Commission voted to stop accepting or processing new and incomplete applications for data centers, data center power plants and utility-scale solar for 180 days, but Antelope's application had already been deemed complete. "It's essentially vested under the current existing ordinance that we have", Hamilton said. The pause did hold up the 2,564-acre Red Butte Data Center and gas plant, whose application was incomplete. Red Butte's developer, BrightNight, estimates it would use 1,900 acre-feet of water a year, according to its application, and says it has kept planning through the moratorium. Resident Riley Cooper of the Iron County Rural Preservation Group said concerns about data centers have unified people across the political spectrum.

What happens next for Antelope is mostly outside the county. Before Iron County can issue a building permit, Pronghorn needs state and federal approvals, including air-quality permits from the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, and the county put a three-year term on the conditional use permit. Hamilton said the conditional use permit is "not a permit to build, by any means". For future projects, the county has drafted a new ordinance that would cap most data centers at 50,000 gallons of water a day, set noise and lighting limits, require efficient cooling, and move approval from the planning commission to the county commission. The moratorium expires on November 22 and cannot be extended. The Iron County Planning Commission is scheduled to hold a public hearing and vote on the ordinance on October 8, after which it goes to the Iron County Commission for final approval.