Sabey has found a primary tenant for its new data center in Eastern Washington.
The primary T-Mobile' data center in Bothell, Washington was flooded last month when torrential rains hit the Seattle area. The outage knocked the T-mobile website offline and disrupted new customer activations nationwide. Bothell is more vulnerable to flooding than other data center hubs in the Seattle area. East Wenatchee is in an area of central Washington that has seen a boom in data centers since 2006, when Microsoft announced a major new facility in Quincy to support its new online services.
Wenatchee World gives details on the site and timing.
Talking to a technology executive who was born in Wenatchee and is familiar with the local economy. He says that past gov't officials had made the decision to invest funds to put in extensive fiber network, including Fiber to the Home. On page 13 of this pdf you can see where Quincy, WA and Wenatchee, WA are listed as 2 of 7 areas with Fiber to the Home. This infrastructure coincidentally is good for data center locations along with low cost of hydroelectric power. Unfortunately, for the local gov't officials who drove this project they were a little ahead of their time and their constituents expected immediate results as they were voted out of office. Well, the next gov't officials are reaping those rewards as Microsoft discovered how Quincy is a top location for a green data center with excellent Internet connectivity. Yahoo soon followed along with Intuit, Ask.com to the same area.
So far, this has turned out to have billions of economic construction impact to the area and given the range of companies there is a diversification beyond Microsoft's initial construction. Mike Manos gives an interview on his data center construction on Channel 10.
So far I haven't run into similar stories about how Google has impacted the local economy as Microsoft has done in Quincy. Has any one seen anything about the broader economic impact of Google arriving to a local area?