Oregon Is Becoming the Data Center Capital of the West — and the Construction Boom Is Just Getting Started
Something extraordinary is happening in the high desert along the Columbia River. Communities that were once known for farming and cheap hydropower are rapidly becoming the backbone of the internet — and the construction activity that’s driving that transformation is unlike anything the Pacific Northwest has seen before.
Oregon now has approximately 2,900 acres of operational data centers. Communities across the state are making way for 9,100 acres of new ones, including the state’s first “exascale” project — a multibillion-dollar installation the size of roughly 1,000 football fields that Amazon hopes to build near Boardman. Lincoln Chronicle
To put that in perspective: the proposed exascale campus alone would be triple the size of Washington Square Mall in Tigard.
Amazon is leading the charge
Amazon Web Services has been building in Oregon’s Morrow and Umatilla counties since 2011, and it shows no signs of slowing down. AWS recently secured 400 acres in Arlington — a small city on the Columbia River about 27 miles west of Boardman — for a new data center project, acquiring an initial 376 acres on a mesa above the city and an additional 30 acres at the Port of Arlington. Data Center Dynamics
Arlington’s mayor greeted the news enthusiastically, calling it an “enhanced growth spurt” for a community that has long sought to diversify beyond its highway identity.
Meanwhile in Hermiston, the city council voted to annex 800 acres of land specifically designated for hyperscale data center development, even as Amazon’s first Hermiston facilities are still under construction OPB — a sign of how aggressively communities are positioning themselves to capture the next wave.
Washington is surging too
Oregon doesn’t have this story to itself. Washington set a new record for data center leasing in 2025, with Central Washington’s inventory nearly doubling to over 400 megawatts as demand surged from cloud and AI providers. Tri-Cities Business News The Tri-Cities region — with its abundant land, affordable clean power, and proximity to Oregon’s established data center hubs — is actively competing for the next generation of hyperscale investment.
The construction opportunity — and the tension
For PNW contractors, the data center boom represents a sustained pipeline of large, technically complex work: civil grading, electrical infrastructure, cooling systems, structural steel, and the roads and utilities that support campus-scale development in rural areas.
But the growth is generating real policy friction. Oregon data centers already receive more than $457 million in total state tax breaks annually, and a budget subcommittee recently approved a measure that would block new projects from receiving enterprise zone tax breaks until summer 2027 OPB — a pause intended to give lawmakers time to evaluate the industry’s impact on the power grid and water supply.
A proposed exascale data center near Boardman would use more power than all the homes in Portland — approaching the demand of the entire Portland metro area at full scale. Lincoln Chronicle Where that power comes from, and who pays for the grid upgrades to deliver it, is a debate that is just beginning.
Governor Kotek has said publicly that the pace of data center growth in Oregon is not sustainable. How that policy tension resolves will shape the construction pipeline for years to come.
For now, the cranes are still going up.
