Data Center Boom in Rural NW
A little pleep of a town near my home has come to life thanks to a new data center, a phenomena that is causing a renaissance in the rural Northwest. Stay tuned for today’s OpenRange, I’m Susan Allen. Micro-soft, Yahoo and Intuit built data centers in what had been considered “out in the boondocks”, miles from Seattle in Quincy small farming community in Central Washington. Amazon.com targeted Boardman on the Columbia river an hour from Pendleton. The Dalles is ga-ga over their new Google data center and now Facebook has said they will invest over $175 million to build a data center where....hint, the community has lived under the shadow of Bend for decades without capitalizing on it’s ruralpolitan explosion. Prineville, population of 10,000 best known as the home of Les Swaub and I might add , a great water skiing reservoir will be joining the recent North West boom in storing data. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Facebook gives Prineville a chance to catch wave that has lifted other small towns in the region .” Having just returned from watching surfers at Hunnington Beach ....when a big wave comes they paddle hard, so they don’t miss it, but they also need to be in deep water to catch the big ones, and not be, (in surfer lingo) a “paddle pus” someone who stays in the shallows. Lets hope Prineville has a good ride.
