St. Joseph City Council heads to Iowa town Friday for data center research

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (KQTV) -- The St. Joseph City Council is heading to Altoona, Iowa for work session regarding data centers on Friday.

The six City Council members requested the work session, but it's unclear how many St. Joseph council members will make the trip. City officials said City Manager Mike Schumacher will be making the trip.

The city of Altoona is home to multiple data centers including a Meta data center that broke ground in 2013, and is more than 5 million square feet. 

The campus is powered by 100% renewable energy through a partnership with MidAmerican Energy and serves as a key hub for Meta’s global infrastructure.

Another Altoona data center is operated by Tract. The 453-acre campus is designed to scale to more than 1 GW of capacity to meet growing regional growing regional cloud demands.

The council will attend two work sessions. The first session will be an open City Council work session with Altoona city officials.

According to the city, the work session will discuss with City of Altoona officials to gain insight into their experience with data center development, including the planning process, lessons learned, challenges, and best practices. 

The second session will be special council meeting, and will be closed.

According to city leaders, this session will discuss matters pertaining to meetings and public records relating to scientific and technological innovations in which the owner has a proprietary interest.