Oregon communities envision 9,100 acres for new data centers, quadrupling the industry’s footprint

By MIKE ROGOWAY/The Oregonian/OregonLive

Oregon communities are making way for 9,100 acres of new data centers, including the state’s first “exascale” project — a gargantuan multibillion-dollar installation the size of 1,000 football fields that Amazon hopes to build near the small city of Boardman.

The Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development tallied up the potential new acreage last month for an inventory of new data centers in the pipeline. The records show communities are maneuvering to make enough land available to quadruple the data center industry’s footprint in Oregon.

Data centers are already straining Oregon’s power grid, raising fears they could prompt steep increases in electricity rates or temporary blackouts amid surging energy demand. They’re also consuming vast amounts of water in small communities like The Dalles.

By some estimates, Oregon’s data center industry is the third largest in the nation. It already occupies about 2,900 acres statewide, according to records collected by The Oregonian/OregonLive. Industry analysts say data centers consume about 11% of the state’s electricity, with that share set to double in the coming years.

Individually, data centers aren’t major employers. Some have just a handful of workers. Even billion-dollar installations typically employ no more than a couple hundred.

But that’s enough to have a big impact in a small community like Prineville, where Facebook parent Meta started construction of its first data center installation anywhere in the world 15 years ago.

The small communities say the data centers have been a lifeline, reviving their economies and providing an infusion of public revenue. They’re also changing the physical landscape of eastern Oregon, replacing arid land with imposing concrete buildings the size of shopping malls.

The data centers’ enormous scale may itself inhibit the industry’s growth. It’s far from clear there’s enough electricity available in Oregon to energize all the projects on the drawing board and it could be many years before some of them are built. Some of the acreage may never be developed. But several new facilities are already under construction and communities are planning for many more in the years ahead.

“As a state, we have only begun to grapple with what our role should be in shaping this industry’s growth and presence in Oregon,” Amy Schlusser, Gov. Tina Kotek’s energy policy advisor, said at the first meeting of the state’s new Data Center Advisory Committee in February.

The governor convened the advisory group in January and gave it the difficult task of catching up to an industry that is already well established in the state and growing rapidly. Kotek said data centers’ effect on Oregon’s environment and community resources is “not sustainable” and asked the task force to find a way to balance its impacts with economic opportunities.

“How Oregon approaches data center development,” Schlusser said last month, “will shape our energy costs, water resources, land use and economic trajectory for decades to come.”

Like nothing else in Oregon

Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta all have huge installations in rural communities across central and eastern Oregon. Several other well-known tech companies, including LinkedIn, Adobe and the social networking giants TikTok and X operate data centers in Hillsboro.

Oregon is attractive to big tech companies because the state has no sales tax to levy on data centers’ expensive computers and puts no cap on the size of tax breaks awarded by local governments. This year alone, data centers will save more than $450 million in Oregon property taxes, according to records compiled by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, says data centers employed about 7,800 Oregonians in 2025. It found a roughly equal number of workers have temporary or part-time jobs in the data center industry as construction workers or contractors.

Most of the growth now on the drawing board is near the small cities of Prineville, Boardman, Hermiston, Arlington and Madras, all near established data centers. Cities and counties are working to expand their urban growth boundaries and rezone farmland for 9,100 acres of more data center development, according to the state’s land-use planning agency.

That’s an enormous expansion — nearly equal to the land area of the entire city of Springfield.

“The magnitude of urban growth boundary expansions for data center development is without modern precedent under Oregon’s statewide land use planning program,” staff with the Department of Land Conservation and Development wrote in a report last month.

Oregon law doesn’t give the state veto power over the projects in development. Local governments can expand their industrial land by showing there is an economic opportunity, gathering community feedback and demonstrating that local utilities have the capacity to serve the site. Oregon law prioritizes industrialization of properties with the least agricultural value.

The state does have authority to shape the course of data center development. The Legislature passed a landmark bill in 2025 that aims to protect residential ratepayers and other businesses from the costs of providing electricity to data centers. And last month, lawmakers put a one-year moratorium on new tax breaks under one of the three large incentive programs used by Oregon data centers.

Oregon’s biggest data center proposal, by far, is a planned complex of data centers envisioned for a vast site just south of the Columbia River along Interstate 84 near the Boardman Airport. Threemile Canyon Farms, a megadairy operating in Morrow County, sold the land to Amazon earlier this month for $37 million, according to local property records.

While Amazon already has several data centers in that area, and is building more by the airport, it said development plans “are not final” for the Threemile Canyon site. It declined to specify what kind of project it envisions there or when it might build, saying decisions will be “based on customer demand.”

Before selling the land to Amazon, though, Threemile Canyon submitted a land-use application to Morrow County that envisions a project unlike anything else in Oregon — or just about anywhere else in the world.

The application describes 4 million square feet of data centers — triple the size of Tigard’s Washington Square mall — divided among at least 16 separate buildings. Applicants said they expect developers would spend $8 billion to $12 billion on the “exascale” data center, employing about 560.

The 1-gigawatt project would use more power than all the homes in Portland. At full scale, it would approach the demand of the entire Portland metro area.

It’s not clear where all that electricity would come from, but Pacific Power submitted a letter in conjunction with the application indicating it had the capacity to serve the site’s ambitious plans with transmission lines that are already permitted to serve other data centers in the area.

Data centers use huge volumes of water to keep their computers cool. The exascale project would have access to 35 million gallons of water annually from the Port of Morrow, according to the application, up to 1,300 gallons per minute to meet peak demand.

Morrow County leaders have approved well over $1 billion in tax breaks for other Amazon data centers but the exascale site doesn’t have an incentive agreement yet. The application says the property would likely seek property tax breaks through Oregon’s Strategic Investment Program. David Sykes, chair of the Morrow County commission, said he’s not aware of any discussions about incentives for that site yet.

The scale of the exascale project astonishes and alarms Kaleb Lay, director of policy and research for environmental watchdog nonprofit Oregon Rural Action.

Morrow County is already dealing with an environmental disaster from nitrate pollution in local drinking water, the consequence of large-scale farming in the area. Lay said it’s confounding that the port is ready to supply water for Amazon’s exascale data center while some residents don’t have clean drinking water.

“We can find 1,300 gallons per minute for an exascale data center? It just doesn’t make sense,” Lay said. “I think it’s just money. Money talks. And the people who are affected by pollution in the basin, they don’t have it.”

The development application describes the new Amazon site as grazeland unsuitable for cultivated agriculture. But Lay said its gentle hills have a stark beauty that would be lost if Amazon builds the exascale data center.

“That high desert rolling grassland is really something to behold,” he said.

Economic infusion

For some rural communities, though, data centers have converted unproductive land into an economic renaissance. Prineville, a city of about 12,000 residents in central Oregon, credits data centers built by Meta and Apple with bringing the struggling community into the 21st Century.

Prineville was shedding jobs and population in the years after the Great Recession, reeling from the closure of timber mills and Les Schwab Tire Centers’ decision to move its corporate headquarters to Bend. Unemployment rose near 20%, and nearly 1 in 7 Crook County residents moved away.

The tech companies helped turn that around, Prineville City Manager Steve Forrester told the state’s Data Center Advisory Committee last month.

“We were in a spot when this first happened to us, when this development started, that we really didn’t have anywhere to go but up,” Forrester said. Meta — then known as Facebook — picked Prineville for its first data center in 2010. Apple followed soon after.

The data centers brought jobs, construction workers, electrical contractors, taxes and fees that buoyed the city’s budget.

“What it’s meant for our community is truly this: We’re a very prosperous community, much like we were after World War II in the ’50s and ’60s when we had lots of sawmills, lots of loggers,” Forrester said. He said that enabled a new police station without public bonds, money for other emergency and public services and support for Prineville community groups.

“It’s a prosperous looking town, with a lot of residential development. It doesn’t have the smell of a dying town, and I have to think a lot of it has to do with the data centers there in town,” said Jeff Omelchuck, an electronics engineer who has spent his career promoting sustainable technology.

Lately, Omelchuck has developed an expertise in data centers’ operations and impacts, and he spoke to the state’s task force in February. Omelchuck said Oregon could take a cue from northern Virginia, home to the nation’s largest data center industry.

“They’re having problems with elected officials and communities deciding, what kind of community do we want to live in? Is it rural or is it industrial? Oregon will face the same thing,” Omelchuck said.

Data centers tend to cluster close together. They benefit from access to contractors, utilities and other resources that expand near large industries. Additionally, tech companies like to have their data centers close together so they can share information rapidly.

From Oregon’s perspective, though, Omelchuck said the state could benefit if it can find a way to distribute data centers more broadly rather than concentrate them in a handful of areas. He said that would protect small communities from being overwhelmed and would share the economic benefits to struggling communities that need it.

“What Oregon should want is to spread out the data center development a little bit so more towns and communities benefit from the tax base brought by data centers without propping them up so much that a few people get fabulously wealthy,” Omelchuck said. “Think of all the timber towns that are desperate for new development. If we could find a way to put a half-dozen data centers in each of them, it may change the nature of state politics and economic development.”

That’s not what’s happening now, and the state data suggests new development will remain clustered in just a few areas now designating more land for the data center industry. All those communities have offered the industry tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks, with neighboring Oregon counties sometimes bidding against one another to see who will offer the biggest public incentives.

If the state is going to give up tax revenue, it should ensure those incentives reward productive industries without placing an undue burden on public resources, said Mary Kyle McCurdy of the conservation group 1000 Friends of Oregon.

“How are we using our taxpayer dollars to create high-quality, long-lasting jobs in Oregon and grow the businesses that are already here?” McCurdy asked.

She acknowledges that data centers have real economic benefits in the communities where they operate. But McCurdy said data centers’ vast appetites for water, land and electricity have consequences all across Oregon. She said the state should slow down to consider data centers’ implications.

“The impacts are statewide on energy and water,” McCurdy said. “Let’s take a pause to take a look at it.”

This story was originally published on March 27, 2026 by The Oregonian/OregonLive.