BOYERS — Iron Mountain is building for the future with an expected $200-million expansion at its underground facility in northern Butler County.

The project is meant to increase the storage company’s computer data center presence at the facility, a former mine.

Mark Kidd, senior vice president and general manager of the Iron Mountain data center, said the industry is expanding rapidly.

He said there will always be a market for people wanting to store physical items such as paper and film.

“The industry ... is about $10 billion and growing about 15 percent annually,” Kidd said. “It’s a huge industry.”

The facility has had data rooms since the 1980s, but Kidd said the company ramped up its data center in the mid 2000s.

Planning began in 2013, and the project is expected to go on until 2019.

“We’ve been building in phases,” Kidd said.

A main part of the project involves keeping the data center cool. Kidd said the rooms and computers carry a significant cost, but keeping those rooms cool costs just as much with the use of conventional cooling systems.

Now, the company plans to use a large underground lake in the facility that formed from decades of mining activity before Iron Mountain took over. The water will be pumped from the lake through piping to the computer rooms and then back to the lake, where it will be reused.

Using this natural resource will keep energy costs low, Kidd said.

Other work will include setting up batteries, generators and other power distribution infrastructure for the computer rooms.

Kidd said there will be five phases. Each one will do the same work of expanding the cooling system and wiring as the first phase, just on a larger scale He described it as “Expanding capacity of the same type of infrastructure as the new clients come in.”

He said the company likely will do one phase per year.

The first phase, which Kidd said will cost about $25 million total, is expected to be complete in April.

He added that there are about 10 acres underground that can be expanded for the data center.

The project has created about 100 construction jobs, and when the work is finished, there will be about 15 to 20 permanent employees added by the company as well as other employees that clients will add.

For the most part, the project is being paid for with company money.

Last year, Iron Mountain received a $2 million grant from the state program called the Economic Growth Initiative. Kidd said state Sen. Scott Hutchinson, R-21st, and former state Rep. Dick Stevenson, R-8th, were helpful in securing the grant.

“It was definitely a kickstarter,” Kidd said.

The facility has about 2,000 clients with the data center having 20 clients. Kidd said he expects to gain about 40 new clients for the data center per year with the expansion.

The U.S. Coast Guard and Englewood Hospital in New Jersey are two new data center clients.

Clients will supply their own computers.

The site has been at its current location off Branchton Road since the 1950s. About 2,500 people work at the facility.