Arizona is an unlikely surf market. It has no coastline, punishing summer heat, and a drought that has run for years across the Southwest, and it also has a wave pool already open in Mesa, a second project proposed in Buckeye on the western edge of metro Phoenix, and a large metro area to draw on. The third project in that pile is a 40-acre surf resort called PHX Surf, planned for Maricopa, about 50 minutes by car from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
The design package is public. AO, the California architecture firm, announced in December 2025 that it would serve as architect of record and released new renderings, and PHX Surf said it was on track to break ground in March 2026 on Maricopa's west side. A month after that target date, the city council was approving a reworked land deal for the site.
What is planned
The centerpiece is a 137,000 square foot lagoon (a little over three acres) powered by Endless Surf's pneumatic system. Endless Surf names its models by the number of pneumatic wave-generating chambers along the back wall, and the lagoon here is an ES48, with 48 chambers, following the "sunglasses-shaped" layout Endless Surf introduced at O2 SurfTown in Munich. Developers say the lagoon's two bays will let different skill levels surf at the same time, a key part of the surf academy and training programs planned on site.
Around the water sits the resort. Phase one includes a hotel district of about 100 bungalows, some with rooftop decks, arranged around the lagoon, and PHX Surf leaders have said the villas will be 3D printed by Icon, the Austin construction technology company. There is a resort center, lagoon-front dining, a fitness center, outdoor pools and gardens, a full-service spa and wellness center, a surf-focused retail district with a surf shop, and an administration and ticketing hub for the surf center and surf academy. Phase two adds an event and entertainment venue on about 3.7 acres, a water park on nearly 18, a pump track, and a 30-site RV district.
The team behind it is Mesa-based PHX Surf, led by CEO Erin LaGrassa, working with AO on architecture and landscape and Endless Surf on the wave. The City of Maricopa is a partner in a more literal sense: it owns the land for the surf facility and leases it to PHX Surf, because, as the city manager explained in 2021, state law requires pools of a certain size to involve a government entity.
From waterpark to wellness resort
The project has been through a full identity change. When it first surfaced publicly in 2021 it was pitched as a roughly $100 million waterpark: slides, a lazy river, and early filings describing a 71-acre site with two five-acre lagoons, an 80-room hotel, about 31,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, and 42 surf villas.
What is on the boards now is smaller: a 40-acre, wellness-focused resort. One lagoon instead of two, the water park pushed into a later phase, and the marketing language moved to "barefoot luxury" with spa, recovery, and fitness programming sitting alongside the surf. That shift matches a trend Surf Park Central, the industry's trade association, has described, with surf parks moving away from stand-alone attractions and into mixed-use developments with hotels, retail, dining and residential units. In July, Bisnow, the commercial real estate news and events company, ran a surf park real estate conference that billed surf parks as "an emerging experiential & lifestyle-driven real estate asset class."
Arizona keeps stacking up
If PHX Surf gets built, it joins a state where one surf park is open today. Revel Surf is already open in Mesa, running a SwellMFG lagoon that breaks as a split peak alongside a deep-water River Wave. Hidden Lake Surf Resort, an Endless Surf project in Buckeye on the western edge of the metro, is bigger on paper, with a 12.5-acre lagoon planned on 120 acres, but it is early in its own process, with no construction start or opening date announced. Add PHX Surf in the south and greater Phoenix could end up with three separate surf destinations.
The obvious question in a desert city is water. The comparison the industry likes to make is to golf: Endless Surf says the average surf lagoon "takes up less space and utilizes less water than one hole of a golf course." Visit Phoenix counts more than 185 golf courses in Phoenix and its neighboring communities.
Where it actually stands
PHX Surf has a public design package and an announced start date that has now passed. The March 2026 groundbreaking was announced in December 2025. On April 21, 2026, the Maricopa City Council approved a realignment of the roughly 72 acres at State Route 238 and Loma Road and an amended lease that moves PHX Surf's city-owned parcel and cuts it from about 12 acres to about 4.19. The amended lease runs 50 years at a base rent of $1,427.98 a month. A Gilbert Sun News article in August 2026 said PHX Surf "reportedly broke ground earlier this year" without saying who had reported it.
It is also not the first date this project has set. A tentative city schedule dated November 2023, obtained by InMaricopa, had construction starting in late June 2024, and developers later told InMaricopa a groundbreaking could happen as early as December 2024; that timeline passed as plans continued to evolve.
None of that makes it unserious. An architect of record, a named wave vendor, a public design package, and a city council that voted for its land deals in 2021 and again in 2026 are real assets. But a target is not a schedule, and until there is grading on the site, PHX Surf sits in the same category as most of the pipeline.
The signals to look for are specific: site work at State Route 238 and Loma Road, a construction contract, and an Endless Surf manufacturing slot. The park page tracks it from here. For everything else in the pipeline, see our opening tracker and the full directory.
Rendering courtesy of AO / PHX Surf.
