QTS groundbreaking ceremony canceled

CEDAR RAPIDS — The groundbreaking for a major Cedar Rapids data center project has been canceled.

The groundbreaking for the $750 million QTS data center project in southwest Cedar Rapids was slated to take place Tuesday morning with expected attendees including company executives and municipal and state leaders.

The company announced the cancellation late Monday, however, following a fatal shooting at a Manhattan office building. Four people died in the shooting, per the Associated Press, including Blackstone employee Wesley LePatner.

QTS is a Blackstone portfolio company, so the Cedar Rapids groundbreaking was canceled “out of respect for the victims, their families and colleagues.”

“This decision was made in response to the tragic event in New York on Monday,” a QTS spokesperson wrote in an email. “We care deeply about the communities where we live and work together, and our hearts and prayers are with those impacted”

The QTS campus is one of two major data center projects planned for the Big Cedar Industrial Center. The second is a $576 million data center campus for Google.

A data center is a facility that houses computer servers, data storage and other equipment that stores information and returns information to end users. With increases in artificial intelligence and cloud hosted data, the number of data center projects nationally is growing.

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