Edged tops out 200MW of Iowa shell, with no tenant named

OMA01-1 and OMA01-2 topped out last week, Edged said, bringing the Council Bluffs campus to full structural height roughly eleven months after the Iowa site broke ground in October 2025. Turner Construction and Jacobs are on the buildings, each about 285,445 square feet in a project known as Project Lola, reported to total around 200MW. Steel going up that quickly across two buildings suggests the schedule risk on this site was never the binding one.

The announcement names no tenant, and the coverage does not say how much of the 200MW sits under contract. That gap, in this asset class, separates a construction story from an investment one. Bryant Farland, chief executive of Edged US, made the regional case that Council Bluffs offers the infrastructure, workforce and business environment large-scale digital infrastructure development requires, and that the campus represents a significant investment in the local economy. That is an argument about why the site works, not evidence that the capacity has a buyer.

Edged's pedigree is unusual: the company was set up by Jakob Carnemark, who founded Aligned, and its US entity is a portfolio company of Koch Real Estate Investments, according to Koch Inc.'s website. That backing underwrites a footprint spanning Missouri, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois, plus a small project planned in Alabama and a second Iowa campus in development outside Des Moines. Building the shell before signing the lease is a strategy only sponsors who can carry a vacancy can run; most developers cannot finance it.

Peers are structuring the lease itself differently. When Anthropic's data center arm hired the architect of Equinix's hyperscale joint ventures, the structure put the anchor tenant on the cap table, concentrating credit on one demand forecast. Edged is carrying that forecast itself. The capital hierarchy is widening, as this publication has argued: hyperscaler-anchored assets collect infrastructure pricing, while unanchored capacity has to self-fund the grid and governance costs no lease covers.

The land offers one clue about which risks this project actually faced: Council Bluffs approved a logistics park on the parcel in 2021 and it sat undeveloped until Edged arrived, meaning the consent was granted well before the load was. Permitting was not the gate here. The test is whether a tenant surfaces for either building before the Des Moines campus moves; if none does, the asset is best held as development with a sponsor's balance sheet behind it, not as infrastructure. That distinction carries real money in the rent multiple, and Edged has not yet given the market a reason to price it the second way.