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Facebook May Make Tiny Town a Data Center Mecca
miller60 writes "Just weeks after the opening of a Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon, local officials say two more companies may build server farms in the small town. Facebook has touted Prineville as an ideal environment for using fresh air to cool servers. The news positions Prineville (pop. 10,000, unemployment rate 17 percent) to emerge as a data center hub similar to Quincy, Washington, a small farm town that now hosts five huge server farms."
Being in the middle of this high desert boom, I can say that most, if not all of the economic development brought into these areas are high on tech
and low on jobs. Our area, Goldendale Wa., just up the river from the new google server farm, has bent over for a regional landfill,
a gas fired turbine juice plant and windmills (1000's), The jobs created were security and maintenance.
One shining success, The cattle ranchers that had crappy land got rich leasing to the windmill operators.
One stated, " I can afford to ranch again"
Disclosure: I work for the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, which recently received donations from Facebook.
I've been out to this datacenter. They employed quite a number of locals to build the place, and although the skeleton crew is only 35, they plan to keep a bigger crew of hundreds out there most of the time. In the medium term, they plan to build *two* more buildings the size of their current one, extending their current need for construction for another two years or so, and requiring a reasonably-sized group of engineers to live in the Prineville area for a while. So Facebook's put money, jobs, and consumers into Prineville, and apparently, according to the locals, this was a real lifesaver for many of the construction workers who were otherwise broke and unemployed.
I'm not a fan of Facebook, but this doesn't really seem like a horrible corporate exploitation.
~ C.