PORTLAND — Facebook said Thursday that it has begun construction of its ninth data center in Prineville, which it says will bring its total spending in the Central Oregon community to more than $2 billion.
The social media giant opened its first corporate data center in Prineville back in 2011 and has steadily expanded. The ninth facility will be 450,000 square feet, a huge installment on par with its predecessors.
When complete in 2023, the nine-building campus will consist of nearly 40 million square feet, equivalent to 24 Costco stores dropped on the edge of a small Oregon town with about 10,000 residents.
Facebook, like other large data center operators, was drawn to Oregon by lucrative tax breaks that exempt its expensive computers from the property taxes other businesses pay. Those tax breaks saved the company nearly $74 million in its first six years in Oregon.
Oregon’s data center tax breaks are among the biggest in the nation and often pit the state’s small towns against one another in a race to offer the biggest deals. The winning towns fare well, though, converting vacant land major industrial sites.
Data centers are not major employers – just a few hundred people work at Facebook’s enormous Prineville facilities. But they provide an infusion of construction jobs that, in Prineville’s case, will have endured for well over a decade by the time construction of Facebook’s newest data center wraps up.
And the electricity used by the data centers generate franchise fees for the local communities. In Prineville, those fees produce more than $2 million a year in revenue for the city.
Apple has two large data centers just down the road from Facebook and is preparing to build a third. And last month, a Lake Owego data center services company called Birch Infrastructure paid $4.5 million for a 159-acre property in Prineville. Birch has not said what it plans to do with the site.
Facebook left the door open to further expansion in Prineville, “based on business needs.”
— Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699
Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
——
(C)2020 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)
Visit The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) at www.oregonian.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
