Yahoo buys land for data center

Yahoo officials said Thursday they’re concluding a purchase of 50 acres in Quincy, Wash., for a new data center.

The land will cost the technology giant about $500,000. It’s being sold to the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company by the Port of Quincy.

The purchase will close today with groundbreaking expected later this year in the Port of Quincy industrial park, Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars said.

Earlier this year, Redmond-based Microsoft Corp. purchased 74 acres in the same industrial park for about $1.8 million. It plans to build six data centers to handle growing information management needs, the company said.

Microsoft plans its data-center groundbreaking in Quincy next week, said Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman in Redmond.

The purchase by Yahoo is its second in central Washington. Earlier this year it announced it’s putting a data center in Wenatchee, in nearby Chelan County.

Both high-tech companies said the decision to put data centers about two miles apart in the same city was based on low land costs, abundant high-speed data networks and inexpensive electric power.

Both companies have numerous data centers scattered across the globe, spokespeople for Yahoo and Microsoft said. The centers house hundreds or thousands of computers on racks that handle critical company information.

“This is part of the evolution of Internet infrastructure, to build more data centers,” Gellos said.

A Quincy city official said land values in the north end of Grant County are already showing the impact of the two companies’ investment.

“We’re already seeing property values shooting up, especially around Quincy and in the Ephrata area,” said Tim Snead, Quincy’s city administrator.

It’s not clear how many jobs the two companies will create or what the salary levels will be. Quincy leaders have said Microsoft expects to employ 40 to 50 people initially.

Yahoo hasn’t developed its final data center plans in Quincy, Hollars said.

A preliminary plan given to Quincy building officials said Yahoo’s Quincy data center should have around 110,000 square feet of space and use about 18 acres of land, said Curt Morris, president of the Port of Quincy board of directors.

The six Microsoft buildings would total about 1.4 million square feet when finished. They will each have at least 220,000 square feet of space, based on plans submitted by Microsoft.

Both companies will buy power from the Grant County Public Utility District, whose rates are far lower than what they’d pay on the West Side of the state or in Spokane County.

Another new major tenant in the Quincy industrial park is Columbia Colstor Inc., a Quincy company that provides chilled warehouse services for agricultural growers. Morris said Colstor has begun building a $25 million, 250,000-square-foot warehouse in the industrial park.

That expansion should add 30 or 40 warehouse jobs, Morris said.

“The total impact of these companies coming will be felt long term,” Morris said. “This will have an impact on schools and other services, and roads.”

“The city is excited. We’re all trying to figure out how all this will affect area tax values,” he said.