After years of permits, hearings, and paperwork, Microsoft has finally put shovels in the ground on its long-planned data center campus in Alviso, the northernmost corner of San Jose. The groundbreaking today turned a once quiet stretch of industrial land into an active construction site, with city and company officials spotlighting the campus’s planned use of recycled water and the local infrastructure upgrades that will come with it.
According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Mayor Matt Mahan attended the ceremony, where San Jose leaders praised Microsoft’s commitment to cooling the facility with recycled water. The event signaled the start of serious earth-moving work on the property that has been sitting in Microsoft’s hands for years.
What Microsoft Is Building
City planning records describe the Alviso project at 1657 Alviso-Milpitas Road as a two-building data center campus, with both structures single-story and totaling about 396,914 square feet. The complex is designed for a maximum electrical load of nearly 99 megawatts, with onsite backup generators and a substantial recycled-water system built into the plan.
Those details come from the city’s environmental addendum and related project filings, as outlined by the City of San José, which lays out how the project is expected to operate and how utility demands will be handled…