Microsoft expanding data center in Quincy, Washington
As a result of the tax incentive recently approved by Washington state legislature to spur data center development in rural areas, Microsoft is now expanding its data center in Quincy.
Online, May 21, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Microsoft expanding data center in Quincy, Washington
As a result of the tax incentive recently approved by the Washington state legislature to spur high-tech data center development in rural areas, Microsoft is now expanding its data center in Quincy.
The company already has a 500,000-square-foot mega-facility in Quincy, where the green renewable hydropower is abundant and broadband fiber optics is plentiful.
Data centers are buildings filled with computers servers that run on the Internet. For Microsoft, data centers run services such as its Bing search engine, Hotmail and cloud-computing platforms, including Azure and Microsoft Online Services. The company has built large facilities in Chicago, Dublin and San Antonio in the past year.
Patrick Boss, Economic Development Director for the Port of Quincy, said Microsoft started the excavation for construction of new data center building about 10 days ago in one of the Port of Quincy's industrial parks.
A new data center has to be at least 100,000 square feet to qualify for the tax exemption. Yahoo and Intuit also have large data centers in Quincy.
"We have had a lot of interest in the past two months [since the tax exemption was approved'," Boss said. "In fact, site selectors from several high-tech companies have visited Quincy recently. The Microsoft site expansion will probably create even more interest."
Boss estimated the data center employs about 50 people, not including those who worked on building the facility.
"For a community the size of Quincy (pop. 6500) it is a good number of jobs." he said. "Also, the property tax revenues generated from the data centers have been a tremendous help to Quincy and has allowed the community to invest more in infrastructure and education."