What's actually being proposed in Gardner.

Location & site

The proposed site is on the southwest side of Gardner, Kansas — an approximately 300-acre parcel of agricultural land bordered by rural homes and family farms.

Site map placeholder Annotated site map will be inserted here, showing the parcel boundary, surrounding residential properties, schools, and waterways. Source: Johnson County AIMS.

Developer

The publicly identified developer is Beale Infrastructure. Project information is published on the developer's site at bealeinfra.com/gardner-kansas.²

Hyperscale data center sites in the U.S. are frequently developed by an infrastructure operator on behalf of a single tenant or a small number of large enterprise tenants. Whether a specific operating tenant has been disclosed for the Gardner site should be verified against the developer's project page and any rezoning application filed with the City.

Scale & buildout

The publicly described project is a hyperscale data center campus: a multi-building, multi-phase development with a multi-billion-dollar capital investment over the buildout period.² "Hyperscale" is an industry term that generally refers to a single-operator campus designed for very large, dense computing workloads — the type of facility used by major cloud and AI providers.

For context, hyperscale data center campuses elsewhere in the U.S. range from a few hundred to more than 1,000 acres at full buildout, with multiple phases delivered over several years. Comparable campuses in the broader Kansas City area include large facilities in De Soto and the Logistics Park / Edgerton area, where individual projects have been valued at multiple billions of dollars.³

Power demand

Hyperscale data centers are among the largest single-customer electrical loads on a regional grid. Industry-typical figures for a hyperscale campus run from the low hundreds of megawatts (MW) into the gigawatt range at full buildout, depending on phase and tenant workload.

For perspective, 1 MW is roughly the average instantaneous power consumption of about 800 U.S. homes (using EIA averages for residential electricity use).⁴ A 100 MW load is therefore comparable to ~80,000 homes; a multi-hundred-MW hyperscale campus is comparable to a small city.

That load has to come from somewhere. In Kansas, this typically requires:

• New substation construction dedicated to the campus;
• Transmission upgrades tying the substation into the regional grid (in this region, the Southwest Power Pool footprint, with Evergy as the local distribution utility);
• A tariff filing at the Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC) governing how those costs are allocated between the data center customer and the broader ratepayer base.

The specific Evergy and KCC filings related to this project should be tracked closely as they become public. The tariff terms determine whether infrastructure upgrades are paid by the data center alone or socialized across all Kansas ratepayers. See Concerns → Power & utility costs for more detail.

Water demand

The developer has stated a commitment to closed-loop cooling with a daily water demand on the order of 15,000–20,000 gallons.² This is materially lower than evaporative-cooling designs, which can use hundreds of thousands of gallons per day per facility.

A few important qualifications:

• Closed-loop is a developer commitment, not a regulatory requirement. Cooling design is generally not codified into local ordinance; it lives in design documents and operational practice. Many data centers initially commissioned as closed-loop have later converted to higher-water-use cooling for capacity, performance, or workload-mix reasons.
• Even closed-loop systems require periodic makeup water to compensate for losses, and typically add water demand for site needs (potable, fire, irrigation, dust control during construction).
• The relevant question for residents is not just what is committed but what is enforceable: is the cooling design written into a development agreement or rezoning condition with measurable performance standards and inspection authority?

The other water question is source: is the project on the City of Gardner system, on WaterOne, or on private wells? Each option has different implications for system capacity, billing, and the impact on neighboring well-water users.

Backup generators

Hyperscale data centers maintain large fleets of diesel backup generators on site. These generators are required by federal regulators (and by the customers themselves) to be tested regularly — typically monthly — and to start automatically during any grid disruption.

The number, capacity, and air-permit conditions for the backup generator fleet at the Gardner site should be specified in the project's air permit filing. Until that filing is public, residents should ask:

• How many generators are proposed at full buildout?
• What is the fuel type, on-site fuel storage volume, and refueling schedule?
• What is the testing schedule, and during what hours?
• What air permit (KDHE) governs cumulative emissions, and what monitoring is required?

See Concerns → Air quality for the public-health context on diesel particulate matter (PM2.5).

Construction timeline

Hyperscale campuses are typically delivered in phases over a multi-year period. Each phase brings sustained heavy-truck traffic on local roads, dust, light, and noise. For a parcel at 191st & S. Clare Rd., that traffic would route through county roads not built for sustained heavy-vehicle loading.

Residents should ask the City for:

• The expected number of phases and the buildout schedule;
• Construction-hour limits, especially for night work and weekends;
• Truck-routing requirements and any commitments to fund road repair from construction wear;
• Dust-control and noise-control commitments during construction.

Operational footprint

Once operational, a hyperscale campus runs continuously. Its visible and audible operational footprint typically includes:

• 24/7 cooling. Continuous fan operation is required to remove heat from the buildings. The aggregate noise from a fully built-out campus is generally measurable at the property line and, depending on terrain and weather, beyond.
• Lighting. Industrial-grade site lighting runs all night for security and operations.
• Generator testing. Regular (typically monthly) test runs of the diesel backup fleet, plus runtime during any grid event.
• Traffic. Once operational the on-site headcount is small, but service vehicle, security, and contractor traffic is continuous.
• Security infrastructure. Perimeter fencing, gate houses, and lighting are standard.

Each of these is covered in more depth on the Concerns page.

What we don't know yet

Some details have not yet been published. As of this writing, residents are still waiting for the City and the developer to make publicly available:

• The full rezoning application and the proposed conditions of zoning;
• Any draft development agreement, including any tax abatement or incentive terms;
• Evergy filings detailing power supply and substation/transmission build-out;
• KCC tariff filings allocating infrastructure cost between the data center and the ratepayer base;
• KDHE air permit filings;
• Traffic and infrastructure impact studies;
• The specific source, volume, and contract terms for water supply.

This page will be updated as those documents become public. If you've seen something we're missing, please get in touch.

Sources

1. Beale Infrastructure project page for the Gardner, Kansas site: bealeinfra.com/gardner-kansas
2. Johnson County Post — coverage of recent multi-billion-dollar data center investments in nearby De Soto and Edgerton, Kansas. johnsoncountypost.com
3. U.S. Energy Information Administration — average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer is approximately 10,500 kWh (≈ 1.2 kW average instantaneous demand). eia.gov FAQ: How much electricity does an American home use?