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."

Re:The natives probably won't be getting the jobs.

[Ethanol-fueled]

Yup.

Here's a real-life example - despite the objection of many retired veterans and other anti-mercenary citizens living in the area, the county government crookedly rubber-stamped a new facility of a Blackwater shell corporation, Wind-Zero. [wind-zero.com] Yeah, look at that again - You have a racetrack, hotel, and an artillery range...a noisy, dirty Disneyland for law enforcement(artillery and helicopter noise pollution affecting vets who chose to retire in what they thought were gonna be quiet neighborhoods, and lead pollution affecting the wilderness and water table) Another method to funnel tax dollars for law enforcement "training" into corrupt private hands.

They say it will bring jobs. All of us know that's bullshit. They will bring in specialists from other counties, states, and countries. The expendables will be hired from nearby Mexicali(local businesses, especially agriculture, also choose to hire from Mexicali despite the county's ~30% unemployment rate), at minimum wage.

If you concerned citizens of America want to know where your country's headed, look no further than California's Imperial Valley. The most jobless county in the blingiest state.

The article:

Prineville (pop. 10,000, unemployment rate 17 percent)

See above, we have 167,000 population with ~30% unemployment.

Re:The natives probably won't be getting the jobs.

[jimmydevice]

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"

Re:The natives probably won't be getting the jobs.

[MostAwesomeDude]

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.