Amazon Plans Oregon’s First Exascale Data Center That Could Use More Power Than All Portland Homes

Amazon submitted plans to Morrow County to build an ‘exascale’ data center (comprising up to 20 separate data centers) on the nearly 1,300 acres near Boardman, the tech giant bought earlier this month for $37 million.

Amazon Plans ‘Exascale’ Data Center Near Boardman

‘Exascale’ data centers are 800 to 1,500 acres, and the property near Boardman looks set to become Oregon’s first ‘exascale’ data center.

Planning documents submitted to Morrow County set out a potential 1-gigawatt facility over up to 20 buildings over 4 million square feet- three times bigger than the Washington Square mall in Tigard.

But Amazon hasn’t yet submitted a development application for the site or set a timetable to start building.

Fueled by demand for artificial intelligence, the tech giant already has several data centers operating or under construction in Morrow County, spread across 800 acres, but the new development would be much bigger than any other Oregon data center.

The site was previously owned by the megadairy Threemile Canyon Farms, which used it for grazing. Johnson Economics was hired to prepare a third-party analysis of the project’s economic impacts.

Based on industry standards and third-party information, Johnson Economic described the data center, to be built over 6 years, as follows:

• 16 to 20 data center buildings at 250,000 square feet apiece.
• Cost: At least $8 billion, potentially as high as $12 billion.
• Employment: 560 full-time employees earning $110,000 apiece on average, and a further 490 support staff working for vendors, maintenance, and security.

This massive data center will have massive power requirements. Oregon’s electricity supply is already severely strained, mainly because of the growth of the state’s data center industry.

At maximum capacity, a 1-gigawatt data center would use more power than all the homes in Portland, ultimately equaling the entire household demand of the Portland metro area.

Pacific Power says it could serve the exascale site with transmission lines that have been approved but not yet built, but data centers can also use enormous volumes of water to keep their computers cool.

The Port of Morrow has committed to supplying 35 million gallons of water annually to the site, and up to 1,300 gallons per minute to meet peak demand.

Data Centers Contribute To Oregon’s Soaring Electricity Consumption

Oregon’s data-center electricity consumption more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. It already accounted for about 11.4% of the state’s total power use in 2023. EPRI projects it could reach roughly 18.9% to 24.1% by 2030 if hyperscale and exascale growth continue.

A survey found that Oregon data centers consumed 6,413,663 MWh of electricity in 2023, accounting for 11.39% of the state’s total electricity consumption.

By 2030, seven additional states– including Oregon– could see data centers exceeding 20% of their respective electricity usage.