Paighten HarkinsA chief executive for CentraCom is distancing the Utah telecommunications company from a massive data center campus planned for Box Elder County after persistent social media speculation and a progressive political action committee suggested the two may be linked this week.
“We are not anywhere near that data center,” Chief Operating Officer Brad Welch said. “We haven’t been contacted by them. We haven’t contacted them.”
Welch, who is also the mayor of Fairview, added that the company has “no desire to be involved” and doesn’t plan to vie for bids to provide fiber for the proposed 40,000-square-foot data center campus.
The three-member Box Elder County Commission voted earlier this week to allow Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, to develop the energy and data campus backed by elebrity investor Kevin O’Leary, despite public backlash and concerns over its potential impact.
Gov. Spencer Cox’s family sold CentraCom to the New York-based LICT Corporation in 2001, but some of his family members are still involved in the business, including in executive roles.
On April 30, Cox made a fiery statement at his monthly news conference in support of the development in Box Elder County.
All states, including Utah, he said, have “an obligation to allow for these types of data centers to be built.”
(Kristin Murphy | Pool) Gov. Spencer Cox speaks at a monthly news conference in Salt Lake City on Thursday, April 30, 2026.
Since then, rumors about a potential connection between the project and CentraCom, which Gov. Spencer Cox’s family founded more than a century ago, have circulated on social media platforms, like X, TikTok and Instagram.
A Thursday post on the Elevate Utah PAC’s Substack, hosted at elevateutah.news, also raised questions.
Elevate Utah PAC’s blog post said: “So why, you might ask, is the Governor throwing a temper tantrum over a project he has no say over? So glad you asked.”
It speculated on two points to suggest a potential connection between CentraCom and the data center project: A statement on CentraCom’s website boasting the company’s “[c]onnection to ALL major data centers in the state,” as well as a MIDA board member mentioning “redundant fiber availability” at the site.
Such a data center, the blog post posited, would need a lot of fiber cables, and CentraCom “has been actively expanding its rural fiber footprint across Utah.”
“To be extremely, legally, please-do-not-send-us-a-letter clear: we are not claiming a conspiracy, illegality, or even a contract exists between CentraCom and Stratos,” the author noted toward the end of the post. “None has been announced.”
Representatives for Elevate Utah PAC did not immediately provide comment on its post or on CentraCom’s denial.
Welch said that while CentraCom are providers for the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, or UTOPIA, in Tremonton, most of CentraCom’s business is with residential and small business clients.
He added that “our infrastructure is so far away, it wouldn’t make sense” to work on this project.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) The CentraCom office in Fairview on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023.
“The cost to build is so substantial,” Welch said, “and it really just isn’t our core business.”
CentraCom’s existing connections to data centers, he said, are the more traditional types, like the Utah-based Fibernet — not the more recent, larger scale facilities needed to support artificial intelligence, which Welch described as a “whole different ballgame.”
The state has paid CentraCom more than $4 million this year, according to the state’s public spending database. Starting in 2013, when Cox became lieutenant governor, the database shows taxpayer payments to the company have ballooned from tens of thousands to millions as it has expanded service to growing number of city and county governments, school districts and smaller public entities.
Cox has previously served as the company’s vice president and general counsel. Cox has said that he has had no relationship with CentraCom since he was sworn into office.
