Amazon Is Betting Billions on Oregon and Washington — Here’s the Scale of What’s Being Built Right Now

If you want to understand where construction dollars are flowing in the Pacific Northwest in 2026 and beyond, there is one company whose footprint dwarfs everything else in the region’s commercial construction pipeline: Amazon Web Services.

Oregon: Already Massive — And Getting Much Bigger

Amazon’s eastern Oregon data center story began in Boardman and Hermiston more than a decade ago. Since 2011, Amazon has significantly contributed to eastern Oregon’s economic growth — the construction, connection, operation, and maintenance of AWS data centers have injected $39.2 billion into the local economy, supporting 8,320 full-time equivalent jobs annually.

But what’s happening now makes everything that came before look like a warmup.

Amazon already has 800 acres of data centers operating or under construction around Boardman, and earlier this year purchased 1,300 more acres for Oregon’s first “exascale” data center — a gargantuan multibillion-dollar installation the size of 1,000 football fields. The land-use application for this exascale project describes a scope that is almost difficult to comprehend: 4 million square feet of data centers — triple the size of Tigard’s Washington Square mall — divided among at least 16 separate buildings, with applicants expecting developers to spend $8 billion to $12 billion on the project, employing about 560 people. The 1-gigawatt project would use more power than all the homes in Portland.

Amazon isn’t stopping at Boardman. The company is also in the process of securing 400 acres in Arlington, Oregon — a small city approximately 140 miles east of Portland and 27 miles west of Boardman — for an additional data center project, having purchased an initial 376 acres on a mesa above Arlington in 2024 and acquiring an additional 30 acres from the Port of Arlington.

Oregon currently has 88 operating data centers with a combined capacity of 4,661 MW, and 29 planned projects that would add 2,342 MW of additional capacity — with Amazon’s Umatilla facility expected to reach operational status in 2026, and multiple additional Amazon facilities in Morrow County expected in 2028.

Washington: The Tri-Cities Emerges as the Next Frontier

While Oregon’s Columbia River corridor has historically dominated the Pacific Northwest data center market, Washington’s Tri-Cities region is rapidly emerging as the next major hub. Major regional projects underway include a roughly $4.8 billion data center campus at Wallula Gap, led by Amazon Web Services, planned as a multiphase build spanning millions of square feet.

Washington set a new record for data center leasing in 2025, with Central Washington’s inventory nearly doubling to over 400 megawatts as demand surges, especially from cloud and AI providers. Energy Northwest and Amazon are also advancing small modular reactor development near Richland — a potential long-term power solution that would support continued data center expansion in the region while addressing the grid capacity concerns that have become the most significant constraint on continued growth.

The Construction Opportunity

The scale of Amazon’s Pacific Northwest buildout represents one of the most significant sustained construction opportunities in the region. Data center construction is among the most intensive forms of commercial construction — massive concrete structures, complex electrical and mechanical systems, redundant power infrastructure, sophisticated cooling systems, and security features all come together in projects that typically run into the hundreds of millions of dollars per facility.

Oregon communities are currently maneuvering to make available a total of 9,100 acres for data center development — quadrupling the industry’s current footprint in the state. Even assuming not all of that acreage develops, the construction pipeline from data center projects in eastern Oregon alone represents billions of dollars in work for civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, and specialty contractors over the next decade.

For NW contractors, the challenge is access. Data center GCs typically prequalify their subcontractors rigorously, favor established relationships, and require specialized experience in high-voltage electrical, precision cooling, and security systems. Contractors who want a seat at this table should be developing relationships with the major data center GCs operating in the region — Turner Construction, DPR Construction, Mortenson, and Hensel Phelps have all been active in Pacific Northwest data center construction — now, before the next wave of projects goes to bid.

Primary source (Amazon Boardman 1,300 acres):
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/report-amazon-buys-1300-acres-near-columbia-river-that-could-become-a-giant-data-center/

Oregon 9,100 acres / exascale detail:
https://lincolnchronicle.org/oregon-communities-envision-9100-acres-for-new-data-centers-quadrupling-the-industrys-footprint/

Tri-Cities / Washington Wallula Gap / $4.8B campus:
https://www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/articles/our-view-march-2026