Amazon plans to build five more datacenters in rural Oregon at estimated cost of $11.8 billion, according to documents filed in Morrow County last week.
The project would more than double the cloud colossus' datacenter footprint in the county. Amazon, home of AWS as well as an online shopping empire, operates four datacenters along the Columbia River, roughly 150 miles east of Portland, according to
Oregon Live, which first reported on the planned expansion on Thursday.
If approved, construction of the five facilities would take place over the next four-five years, with the first facilities coming online in late 2023 and the last slated for early 2027.
According to government documents [
PDF], Amazon expects each datacenter to cost approximately $2.37 billion. This includes $280 million for the building, $140 million for supporting infrastructure — presumably power and thermal-management systems — and $1.95 billion for the datacenter infrastructure itself.
In total, the expansion is hoped to create 600 high-tech jobs — 120 per datacenter — with an average salary of $75,000, which Amazon claims is $20,000 more than the county’s median household income. The internet super-corp right now employs 461 full-time workers at its Morrow County datacenters.
