Kraft’s $16 Billion Sutton Data Center, Valued by the Town at a Third

Sutton Town Manager Austin J. Cyganiewicz sent the Select Board a memorandum dated November 9, 2026, titled “Unified Parkway Data Center Project Proposal, Preliminary Fiscal and Regulatory Review.” It says Unified Global Packaging Group (UGPG) and The Kraft Group have proposed a data center campus on property off Boston Road and Providence Road, within UGPG’s Unified Parkway property. The site is crossed by a 345 kilovolt transmission line running from Millbury to West Farnum and by a 115 kilovolt line, and the developer’s preliminary plan shows two substations on Lot 1 plus an additional National Grid substation for Phase 2 on Lot 5 near Dudley Road. Phase 1 is two buildings, DC-01 and DC-02, of about 250,000 square feet and roughly 90 megawatts each, opening in 2029. The developer’s financial analysis assumes eight more buildings of the same size opening two a year from 2030 through 2033, for roughly 900 megawatts at full build-out. The memo says the layouts are conceptual and that the configuration of Phase 2 has not been determined.

The money in the memo is the developer’s estimate, and the memo says so. The developer values each building at about $675 million of real property, of which $600 million is electrical, cooling and generator systems, plus approximately $1 billion of computer equipment. That puts Phase 1 at about $3.35 billion and the full campus at roughly $16.75 billion in 2026 dollars, against about $2.85 billion of assessed value for all taxable property in Sutton today. The operator has told the town it is in discussions with ISO New England for power and is exploring reclaimed water for cooling, but the memo says water volumes, supply, wastewater and the timing of power have not been provided. Its bottom line is plain: the proposal is tentative and no application has been filed. PSV found no announcement from The Kraft Group or UGPG; the project was first reported by MassLive and then Bisnow.

The memo is a rare public look at how a host town values a data center before anyone negotiates. Town staff did not adopt the developer’s numbers. They assumed about $250 million per building for the building and land, citing industry figures presented at the 2026 national assessors’ conference, and about $560 million of standard server equipment on a rapid depreciation schedule, which comes to about $586 million of taxable value per building in the first year, roughly a third of the developer’s figure. Even at that discount, the town’s model has the campus paying about $10.4 million a year from Phase 1 in FY2031 and about $27.8 million a year with all ten buildings assessed in FY2035, about $323 million over FY2030 through FY2042, plus an estimated $31 million in one-time building permit fees. In FY2035 that is 52.8 percent of the levy, and the single tax rate falls to about $5.68 per $1,000 from $12.05 without the project. The town’s entire FY2027 levy is about $32 million.

Two consequences follow for anyone who owns, lends on or sells property near a project like this. First, the town’s own model has the asset shrinking on the rolls: Phase 1 is assessed at $1.177 billion in FY2031 and about $880 million in FY2034 as equipment depreciates, and the Phase 1 tax bill falls from about $10.4 million to about $8.7 million over the same years. Second, the memo notes the Select Board’s annual classification vote could shift more of the levy onto commercial and industrial property, including the data center, which would cut residential bills further but raise them for other commercial owners. The figures below are PSV arithmetic from the memo, not town or developer figures.

Both sides of this negotiation need the same artifact: a host-town fiscal reconciliation that puts the developer’s value build and the assessor’s value build side by side, line by line. Inputs: the developer’s per-building cost split (shell and land, electrical, cooling and generators, IT equipment), the town’s Multi-Year Financial Plan and levy history, the assessor’s depreciation schedule for personal property, the January 1 valuation date and the phasing calendar, and the classification options the board can vote. Output: for each fiscal year, the assessed value under each assumption, the tax paid, the data center’s share of the levy, and the residential and commercial rates, with each cell tied to a page in the memo or the plan. The memo already contains most of this; Sutton published both the developer’s financial analysis pages and its own model.

The reviewer is the assessor on the town side and the developer’s tax counsel on the other, and the approval gate is that no guaranteed minimum assessed value or payment schedule goes into a community benefits agreement until both have signed off on the same reconciliation. An assistant is well suited to the mechanical part: extracting the tables, recomputing per-square-foot and per-megawatt values, flagging where the developer’s and town’s numbers diverge, and tracking the depreciation curve forward. It should not pick a capitalization rate, set an equipment life, or decide what a fair minimum assessment is. PSV ran no model on Sutton’s figures beyond the arithmetic shown here, tested no product, and promises no tax, cost or permitting outcome.