# of Data Center Employees (Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit, and Microsoft) in Washington Columbia Basin

I've seen #'s thrown around that Google employs 200 people at a data center

Eventually, we plan to employ approximately 200 people, ranging from technology assistants to experienced data center managers. We’re confident this $600 million investment will be good for Council Bluffs, Google and our Internet users.

In the Columbia Basin Herald reports on total employment changes, if you add up Yahoo, Ask,com, Intuit and Microsoft employee #'s they add up to 180.  Something seems strange that 4 big data centers in the Columbia Basin have less employees than one Google data center.  What are those 200 people doing?  Are they maintaining and building Google's custom servers?  All of the below people use industry standard servers.

In April the first of three data centers in Quincy went live. The Microsoft data center will be used to house information that is essential to Microsoft's Windows Live Internet service. Employment at Microsoft was around 50 employees in April and will continue to increase as more servers are added to the facility.

In mid June, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax and Quickbooks, broke ground for a data center in Quincy across the street from the Yahoo! data center. The facility is expected to be complete by fall of 2008 and will employ around 50 people.

In December Yahoo! officially declared its data center in Quincy operational as it held a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The data center will employ around 50 people and will house information for the Yahoo! search engine and other properties.

Ask.com , Moses Lake, Data Center, 30 people.

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T-Mobile Data Center joins Central Washington Neighborhood Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, ask.com

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?

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Yahoo gets hit with 7.9 sales tax for Quincy Data Center

Yahoo had a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new facility in Quincy with David Filo, co-founder attending. A recent finding by the Washington state attorney general removes a 7.9 tax break for this new data center.

The loss of the tax break could keep Yahoo from investing in future phases of the data center that opened Monday, Filo said.

"So far everything has worked out well," he said, noting the favorable economic, political and geographic conditions that have made building data centers in the middle of farm fields in Central Washington a sensible thing to do. The abundance of cheap power available in the region is the bottom-line benefit for server farms, but the rural tax break is so significant that Yahoo would not have built in Quincy had it not been part of the equation, said Laurence Mann, a Yahoo senior vice president.

The sales tax break would have saved Yahoo and other data centers the 7.9 percent tax charged on construction and equipping of a facility, said Mike Gowrylow, a spokesman for the state Department of Revenue.

Microsoft opened a portion of a 500,000-square-foot data center in Quincy in April. The tech company Intuit also is building a facility in Quincy.

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Purple Yahoo Data Center in Quincy, WA

Found a posting about Yahoo's new data center. A bunch of us are wondering why Yahoo would paint their building purple? I've been to the Microsoft Data Center in Quincy a couple of times, and it is a lot bigger. I can't quote you the size, but if you walk around the building you'll have traveled 1.3 miles.  That's a lot bigger than 14,000 140,000 square ft (Below is a typo, the building is 140,000 sq ft) , and the Microsoft guys painted the roof white to help reflect the sun during the hot summers. I wonder how much hotter the building gets when they are purple? I've got to believe it was the PR/corporate image team who decided to paint the building purple.

Yahoo! builds new Data Center the green way

December 13, 2007 at 4:55 pm · Filed under Environment, Tech Industry

big_quincyexterior.jpg

A new 14,000 sq. ft Yahoo! data center was open in Quincy, Washington and had a welcome ribbon cutting by David Filo as well as Wylie Gustafson, the original guy who yodels “Yahoo!” at the end of commercials. Quincy, Washington was chosen as the prime location due to its fiber connectivity, network availability, affordable power, land and operations, and welcoming community. The best part about this data center was that it was custom built as opposed to all the other data centers that are usually rented. This allowed Yahoo! to put energy efficiency as a top priority in the design and construction of the data center. One advantange of being in Washington was the ability to draw in the cold air outside to cool the servers without using air conditioning. Carbon-free electricity using hydro and wind power the facility and all the lights operate on motion sensors. This is a great step in Yahoo!’s step in reducing energy consumption and becoming carbon neutral by the end of this year.

Here are more details about the Microsoft Data Center for comparison.

Microsoft has completed its first building at its Quincy, Washington data center and a leisurely walk around it is about 1.3 miles.

That little ditty comes from Michael Manos, senior director of Microsoft’s data center services unit. Manos was interviewed by Tina Wood at Channel 10.

Some other key highlights from Manos:

  • The general idea for Microsoft’s data centers is to make them a development platform (presumably for cloud services in the future).
  • Microsoft takes being green and sustainability seriously to be socially conscious and save money. Manos didn’t serve up many specifics.
  • The software giant goes through a 31-factor heat map to select locations for data centers. These factors include the price of land, power capacity and fiber-optic availability. These maps are also used to find good locations to position Microsoft for the future.
  • Microsoft has started a data center in San Antonio.
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