There’s a behemoth coming to Oregon. In October, Apple broke ground on its biggest data center yet on 160 acres of land in Prineville. The data center will be home to two 338,000-square-foot buildings and will host the lion’s share of iCloud. Are new data centers what we need, though?
THAT’S WHAT’S THE MATTERThere’s a behemoth coming to Oregon. In October, Apple broke ground on its biggest data center yet on 160 acres of land in Prineville. The data center will be home to two 338,000-square-foot buildings and will host the lion’s share of iCloud. Are new data centers what we need, though?
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Apple will be the relatively new kid on the block, considering that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Adobe all have similar facilities in the state. As cloud computing becomes a major staple of daily life, Oregon is attracting even more server farms and tech companies.
At the beginning of the recession, I remember state politicians railing against Oregon’s taxes, claiming it would drive businesses away from the state; businesses were already leaving in droves. That was ridiculous.
Oregon’s become increasingly more attractive to out-of-state corporations specifically because of the tax breaks. They get big breaks on property taxes because of enterprise zones in Wasco, Umatilla, Washington and Cook counties, and the lack of sales tax means construction materials and computers are millions of dollars cheaper. Google saves about $24 million by operating here.
They also like our cheap and plentiful power, and our low temperatures save money on cooling. It’s important that we keep it that way, though. New data centers are becoming a strain on local power companies, and local towns could end up paying more as power companies try to compensate.
Local economies shouldn’t take the fall for increased power needs.
As the state’s energy needs grow, we should use this demand to make green energy a bigger priority. Facebook installed solar panels and uses Prineville’s dry air as part of a cooling system. Apple’s expected to do something similar and has pledged its facility will be powered 100 percent sustainably. The problem is that Apple counts hydroelectricity as sustainable, which means more power from Oregon’s grid.
New data centers pump a lot of money into the economy while they’re being built, but they don’t employ very many people, putting us at risk of higher power rates. And they don’t pay very much in taxes. Attracting business is good, but our economy could be benefitting so much more when businesses like Google and Apple come to town.
Rather than working to attract new server farms, we should be trying to attract new facilities and offices that interact with local economies. With Hewlett-Packard going downhill, and places like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific letting people go, Oregon has a lot of qualified workers, and Portland seems to have an endless supply of underemployed programmers.
Intel has more than 16,000 employees here and currently has its largest site in the world out in Hillsboro. It puts billions of dollars back into our economy (and to charity) in exchange for the same benefits the data centers enjoy. Data centers aren’t as big of a deal as real campuses could be.
I grew up in Albany, Ore., where a ton of HP workers lived before the company started making terrible decisions. Outside of town we also had Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific as well as a paper mill. Albany’s economy was great when those businesses were booming. Manufacturing jobs help economies, and I’m not convinced that the kind of business Prineville and other towns are getting now will.
Simply building infrastructure doesn’t give our economy the help it needs. A bunch of data centers won’t put money into the town or state in the long term. Towns that make deals like the ones The Dalles made (in which Google pays $250,000 a year instead of taxes on equipment and buildings) lose money because they’re afraid of losing business.
The “Silicon Forest” is great for Oregon, but it could be a lot better. We should still try and get these new businesses, but we need to stop being so lenient that they become a drain on the economy. The tech industry is the future, but that future shouldn’t come at such a high cost.
