Beale Infrastructure, the firm that backed out of plans to build a data center in Coweta because of opposition, is busy with construction of a $3 billion project near Kansas City, Kansas.
Beale, a portfolio company of Blue Owl Capital Inc., started construction near De Soto, Kansas and the Panasonic battery plant, the $4 billion project that Oklahoma was once considered as a site but lost in competitive bidding with Kansas.
The De Soto project includes four data center buildings totaling nearly 2.9-million-square feet reported the Kansas City Business Journal. The Journal said work started in April nearly two weeks before the De Soto Planning Commission approved the project’s site plan on April 28. Construction will consist of two phases and the first will be an 863,000-foot data center building on nearly 20 acres. The second phase will be a 300,000-square-foot building. Work on the first phase won’t be finished until late in 2028.
Nearby is a 1 million square foot distribution center partially leased by Panasonic.
Beale calls the large effort Project Pilot and explained it will also create air-cooled data center facilities. Once the large campus is operational, it will consume 5.5 million to 7.3 million gallons of water a year. The city of De Soto and a rural water district will service the project’s water and wastewater.
Beale Infrastructure revealed plans in late 2025 to build a Project Atlas data center in Coweta but the city planning rejected a permit on a 4-1 vote after residents organized opposition. At the end of March 2026, Beale announced it would not proceed with the planned 270-acre campus. The withdrawal came even before the Coweta City Council could vote on the issue.
Afterward, Beal, based in San Francisco, said it would still work on building “meaningful community investments” elsewhere in Oklahoma.