More than 14 years after it was first announced as an international trade hub, the unfinished PhoenixMart site in rural Pinal County now stands as what ABC15 Arizona describes as a skeleton of concrete and metal bones. Its developer, AZ Sourcing LLC, wants to give part of that stalled land a new identity: the Casa Grande Tech Center.
According to ABC15 Arizona, AZ Sourcing is seeking to amend a portion of the previously approved Naltec-PhoenixMart planned area development to create the Casa Grande Tech Center. The amendment would revise 251 acres of the 585.9-acre PhoenixMart planned area, and the Casa Grande Planning and Zoning Commission is set to consider it on Nov. 12. The developer's own website advertises the Casa Grande land as the future home of a next generation data center, and AZ Sourcing says the project is suited for what it calls Arizona's expanding silicon desert ecosystem, per the company's website.
A Trade Center That Never Quite Arrived
PhoenixMart was first announced in 2011 as a sourcing center meant to bring manufacturers, sellers and buyers together for large-scale purchases, according to The Seattle Times. Reporting has conflicted on exactly when Scottsdale-based AZ Sourcing acquired the land: Cronkite News reported the purchase happened in 2011, with Casa Grande approving initial design plans the following year, while a 2011 San Tan Valley.com report said the land was bought from a private owner in 2010.
The project's timeline kept shifting. That same 2011 report said the facility was expected to be up and running by the end of 2012, with groundbreaking anticipated in early 2012. By 2015, the projected completion date had slipped to mid-2016, according to the earlier San Tan Valley.com account. The Seattle Times reported delays and setbacks surrounding PhoenixMart, along with a federal investigation.
Grading Finished, Buildings Never Came
By 2015, Cronkite News found the 585-acre site still sitting vacant, with only three development installations visible near its entryway as the only signs of progress. Developers told Cronkite News at the time that 95% of site grading had been completed and that workers had begun foundation work, even as construction awaited further city approvals.
Arizona's Data-Center Boom Sets the Backdrop
The proposed rebrand arrives as data centers reshape land-use fights across Pinal County. Casa Grande's Planning and Zoning Commission voted 6-1 on Oct. 2 to approve the separate Grande Valley Data Center project, capping that complex at 300 acre-feet of water use per year — about 97 million gallons — according to KJZZ. Just weeks earlier, Pinal County supervisors voted 4-1 to reject Vermaland's La Osa Energy Center rezoning request near Eloy, even after developers offered an 80% reduction in the project's original scale, KJZZ reported. That proposal had called for 11 data-center buildings, a 500-megawatt natural-gas plant and battery storage meant to serve 1 gigawatt of total energy demand.
The same KJZZ reporting noted that four Arizona communities, from Page to Pima County, had proposed or debated tighter rules on data centers in the weeks before the La Osa vote, and that Pinal County's zoning code currently has no definitions or specific development requirements for data centers. Separately, industry representatives told the Pinal County Board of Supervisors that data-center water consumption is not currently a concern in Arizona, and that electricity providers aim to ensure such projects cover their own high power costs without burdening residential customers, according to Pinal Central.
Other Industrial Projects in the Pipeline
Data centers aren't the only heavy industry drawing scrutiny in Casa Grande. A city planning staff report describes KPPC Advanced Chemicals' proposed manufacturing campus as a conditional-use-permit request for a 26.22-acre site, with an initial roughly 6-acre phase dedicated to purifying and blending semiconductor-grade hydrochloric acid and ammonium hydroxide, according to a Casa Grande planning staff report.
Whether the Casa Grande Tech Center amendment moves forward remains to be seen. The Planning and Zoning Commission's Nov. 12 meeting will mark the next test for a project that has spent more than a decade promising transformation for the same stretch of Pinal County land.
