updated Jan 22, 2010
Company X is Facebook /2010/01/facebook-data-center-115-pue.html
DataCenterKnowledge has a post on Company X Plans for Oregon Data Center.
Company X Plans Oregon Data Center
November 23rd, 2009 : Rich Miller
The city of Prineville, Oregon is negotiating with a large, secretive company that wants to build a data center in its enterprise zone.
A “well-funded, well-known company” is negotiating to build a large data center in central Oregon, and the secrecy surrounding the negotiations has folks in the town of Prineville wondering who it might be. Officials in Prineville have been negotiating with Vitesse LLC, a company performing site selection for the unnamed end user that would build operate the data center, according to local media reports.
The site is several hours from an existing Google data center in The Dalles and a Boardman site whereAmazon is said to be resuming construction on a major data center project. Like those projects, the process in Prineville has been cloaked in secrecy.
Hints of the company are hard to find.
Oregon business registration records indicate that Vitesse LLC was registered Oct 21 and shares a San Francisco address with the law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofksy & Walker. Attorneys with Paul, Hastings have data center site acquisition experience, including past engagements with large financial companies and Internet companies.
The proposed facility would be located near the Prineville Airport in an enterprise zone, which allows the city to waive property taxes for eligible projects. Tomorrow the Prineville City Council is scheduled to consider selling a 1-acre piece of property to Vitesse for $50,000, annex two adjacent properties to the city and approve a 15-year property tax exemption for the company that would operate the data center.
I am off to Oregon for Thanksgiving this weekend and we are planning our own tax-free purchases compared to Washington’s high state sales tax. But, I wouldn’t do that because I would have to pay the sales tax anyway when I brought the goods back to state of Washington. :-)
DataCenterKnowledge makes the same point for data centers and state sales tax.
Washington Repeals Tax Break
In late 2007 Washington State ruled that data centers aren’t manufacturers and were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises, and thus must pay a 7.9 percent tax on data center construction and equipment. This prompted protests from Microsoft and Yahoo, who said they had relied upon the tax break in their decision to build facilities in Quincy.In a letter to legislators, Yahoo co-founder David Filo said the withdrawal of the sales tax incentive “swings the decision strongly in favor of freezing construction in Washington, and building instead in Oregon (which has no sales tax), as some of our competitors are already doing.”
Microsoft subsequently migrated its Windows Azure cloud computing infrastructure from its data center in Quincy to another Microsoft facility in San Antonio.
How important is it to blog about this problem of Washington State Sales Tax? A funny piece of data for me is Google Search has my one of my blog posts #9 for “Washington State Sales Tax”