Data centers boosted one Oregon town's economy, but some residents have had enough

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Data centers are nothing new; big tech companies have been building them for decades.

What is new is the increasing attention being paid to them by local activists and elected officials, and their increasing unpopularity with the public (as shown, for instance, in multiple public opinion polls).

As the data center sector has expanded across Oregon, the small city of Prineville, in high sagebrush desert about 60 miles east of the Cascade Mountains, has been an early and repeat adopter.

Back in 2010, Facebook broke ground for its first data center in Prineville to take advantage of the cool, dry climate, along with abundant industrial land and power supplies for development. Meta's Prineville hyperscale data center campus has grown into one of the company’s biggest in the U.S.: 11 buildings covering 3.2 million square feet, according to information provided by Meta.

Apple also operates a major data center in town. Together, the facilities represent total investments of $8 billion, according to a spokesperson for Economic Development for Central Oregon.

With a hinterland of mountainous pine forests, Prineville and surrounding Crook County once supported half a dozen sawmills running three shifts a day.

But by 2010, Prineville’s timber industry was dying, said Nicole Ramos, regional economist for the Oregon Employment Department. After the Great Recession, “employment in that industry just started to decrease and kept decreasing. It never recovered.”

The county’s unemployment rate approached 20%, and median household income was near the bottom statewide, said Caroline Ervin, Prineville’s director of economic development.

“Prineville, economically and from a community perspective, was dying on the vine,” she said. “We had a declining population. Fast-forward to now, we have a growing population and a thriving community.”

Ramos said unemployment is now at 6% in the county. As of 2024, it had the highest median annual income for private-sector employees in the state — $93,332 per year.

Ramos said a main driver is the rise of the data centers, which has increased the number of local information workers and sent their contribution to the local economy soaring. “It’s not a huge piece of the employment pie in the area,” said Ramos. “But if we look at real GDP in Crook County for the information industry, that represents 48.3%, which is a staggering amount.”

Tax breaks and community investments

The Meta and Apple data centers sit in a sprawling industrial park along the canyon rim above downtown Prineville and the Crooked River Valley: hundreds of acres of steel and concrete server buildings topped by electrical towers, surrounded by high-security fencing. There’s little sound but the hum of generators and the wind blowing across the sagebrush prairie.

Ervin said the change in the economy over the past 15 years has been “meteoric, far-reaching, with significant job creation.” Ervin estimated that roughly 2,000 temporary construction jobs have been created through the successive data-center expansions, while “in terms of permanent jobs — approximately 450 — both direct and operational contractors. That’s a really significant number for our community.”

Meta told Marketplace in an email that its data center supports 350 “operational jobs,” but that “we don't break down the total count between full-time and contingent workers.”

Jason Beebe has experienced the impact of data center expansion firsthand: “They’ve put a lot of people to work. They’ve changed my life; they gave me a new career opportunity.”

Beebe is Prineville’s former mayor (an unpaid position) and works as a technology trainer. He spent 22 years at Les Schwab, a regional tire-store chain, then got a job at Meta’s data center.

“When I was a contractor there, I made pretty good money,” said Beebe ($45/hour in 2020). He’s also worked as a direct employee for Apple. “Benefits are probably a little better when you’re a direct employee. But they’re still good high-paying jobs either way.”

Meta and Apple have also invested millions in public infrastructure — including for an underground water storage system and wastewater disposal; they’ve supported the development of solar farms in the sparsely populated desert to feed their energy needs. Meta also said it’s contributed more than $5 million to local schools and nonprofit foundations.

The companies pay about $1 million per month to local government in the form of franchise fees, said Beebe — which cover use of the public right-of-way for electricity service.

But the companies don’t pay much in the way of property taxes. Local officials have granted each company a break under Oregon’s rural enterprise zone program.

Here’s how it works, explained Crook County Tax Assessor Jon Soliz: Each company’s major structures in Prineville “are tax-free on all the improvements, everything except for the land basically — so buildings, machinery and equipment, and also the personal property, the servers.”

Assuming the companies meet annual employment, wage, and investment thresholds, which are verified by local economic-development and state tax officials, each building’s exemption runs for 15 years. According to Soliz’s tax records, Meta has 11 separate tax-exempt buildings, Apple has four, all with staggered start- and end-dates for their 15-year tax exemptions.

Without the tax breaks, the data centers’ combined property tax bill last year would have been $31 million, said Soliz. With them, “Meta paid in this last year $178,000. Apple paid $169,000 in property tax.”

But that is about to change. Meta’s original 15-year tax break on its first data center building expires in 2027. Soliz predicts the company’s tax bill will jump from $178,000 to $4 million, representing more than a quarter of all county property-tax receipts. (He said the county collected $14 million in the 2025-26 tax year.) The companies’ rural enterprise-zone tax exemptions will continue expiring through 2035.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed Soliz’s estimate, writing in an email: “We expect the city of Prineville and Crook County will begin seeing millions in tax revenue in the next fiscal year,” and that the company is “not seeking any extensions” to its property-tax exemptions.

Neither company agreed to an interview for this story.

A town divided on data centers

It’s not hard to find folks who’ve been economically boosted by the data centers in town — landscapers, realtors, homebuilders, caterers, and the like.

Britney Meyer is a bartender at the Wild Rooster Bar and Grill across the street from Meta’s front gate. “They come in all the time,” she said of the employees and contractors. “For lunch, or they’ll get big takeout orders. A lot of guys come in to get beers together. If they weren’t here, I don’t know. I assume I’d still be bartending, but I don’t know if this would have been built.”

Scott Cooper was born and raised in Prineville. He’s a former City Council member who now directs a regional social-service nonprofit.

“My family runs a small electrical contracting business,” he said, “and they’re having trouble keeping electricians, because they keep getting scooped up by data centers paying them six figures or more. That’s not a bad job for a kid out of high school who got into the apprenticeship program.”

It’s also not hard to find local data-center skeptics.

Karl Wilkerson runs Dad’s Place, a diner on Main Street. He doesn’t think all the construction workers or the permanent data-center workers help his business much.

“They have their own cooks and their own cafeteria and stuff up there,” he said, “so if you think about it, it hurts us in a way. If they didn’t have that, they would have to come down to eat — not necessarily at our spot, but other places around town.”

He also doesn’t like the changes he thinks the data centers have brought — to the culture, landscape, and cost of living.

“Big corporate of any sort, any time you get them in the community, everything price-wise tends to go up, whether it be housing, food prices, gasoline prices,” he said. “When I moved here, I wanted the small-town vibe, the old cowboy atmosphere. And I don’t see that anymore.”

Others are worried about the data centers’ power and water usage in a region prone to drought and wildfires, with wells in some parts of the county running dry.

Julie Thompson is among them. She’s a former veterinary-office and livestock-auction manager, currently running for Crook County Commissioner. She lives several miles outside of town, surrounded by rolling irrigated pastureland; the family keeps horses along with a pack of hunting dogs.

Standing on her back porch, Thompson pointed across the Crooked River Valley to the canyon rim and said: “Up there on the top with all the power pole things, that is Facebook — lit up all night, so we don’t get to come out and see the stars that direction anymore. It has changed our view here.”

Thompson admits good has come from the facilities — and that it’s landed close to home. “My daughter works for Apple; he’s been there 10 years,” said Thompson. “And without that job, she wouldn’t be able to probably still be here and buy her house.”

But Thompson sees a lot of local support for not building any more.

“We have a big square-footage of our land used up, and water and all that, by data centers,” she said. “Let ‘em go somewhere else. Everybody should share the — I guess — the burden of a data center, and not just put them all in one spot.”