Microsoft Inc. has purchased 111 acres of Madison County farm ground on which it plans to build a data center, the sixth that would be located in the city of West Des Moines.

The Washington-based technology giant paid Flinn Farms LLC $10.46 million for just over 77 acres, Madison County real estate records show. Microsoft paid Marco Properties LLC $4.89 million for nearly 34 acres.

The properties are located south of Veterans Parkway between Woodland Avenue and Southwest 60th Street. The new data center would be west of Microsoft’s Osmium data center.

The $10.46 million real estate transaction appears to be the largest recorded in Madison County, a county official told the Business Record.

The next largest transaction appears to have occurred in 2016 when Hy-Vee Inc. sold its store property in Winterset to Hurd & Daughter LLC in a sale/lease-back transaction. That transaction totaled $6.78 million, county records show.

Annexation into West Des Moines of the land on which the proposed Microsoft data center is planned was approved by the state’s City Development Board in November. The West Des Moines City Council in December approved the final readings of an ordinance establishing the area as light industrial zoning.

City officials are working with Microsoft on a development agreement that is expected to be discussed by the council sometime in 2024’s first quarter, a spokeswoman for the city said.

Details about the proposed project, including square footage and development costs, have not been released.

Microsoft began building data centers in West Des Moines about 14 years ago. The tech giant’s fourth and fifth data centers – Ginger East at 1475 S.E. Maffitt Drive and Ginger West at 11100 Booneville Road – are currently under construction. When completed, the two data centers are expected to each have about 1.8 million square feet of data center space and cost about $1 billion each to develop.

The three other Microsoft data centers located in West Des Moines are Project Alluvion at 550 S.E. White Crane Road, Project Osmium at 5855 S.W. Kerry St., and Project Mountain at 8855 Grand Ave.