Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, like many people on the frontier of America’s tech boom, is basking in newfound prosperity.
Her hometown in northeast Oregon was not long ago known for a former chemical-weapons depot nearby, a state prison on the city’s outskirts and the strip clubs once dotting its main drag. But a growing fleet of Amazon data centers has turned the region around Umatilla into an unlikely nerve center for one of the most expensive infrastructure build-outs in U.S. history.
The tech giant has pumped jobs, people and money into the community of roughly 8,000, doubling many home prices and enticing builders to etch new neighborhoods into surrounding hillsides. That means dollar signs for Realtors like Leon-Tejeda.
The daughter of Mexican-born farmhands, Leon-Tejeda worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center before qualifying for a real-estate license. Now, she is on pace to close 35 deals this year. The 35-year-old aims to raise her kids in a soon-to-be-built house overlooking the Columbia River and has her eye on Airbnb investments to cash in on the region’s growth.
“It’s a family victory and God’s blessing,” she said of her new home. “People are wanting to come to Umatilla now.”
That development is injecting vast sums of cash into sometimes unexpected corners of the country—many of them bypassed by previous boomtimes.
Investment in data centers and their immense electricity needs are among the few types of construction spending that have grown over the past year, according to the Commerce Department.
“These hyperscalers are willing to pay top dollar for materials, talent, land, for everything imaginable,” said Anirban Basu, chief economist for the trade group Associated Builders and Contractors.
Corporate America’s push for cloud-storage capacity and AI computing power has set off a similar scramble to land projects by growth-hungry communities stretching from Atlanta suburbs to the Texas prairie to remote corners of North Dakota. Last week, Oracle and OpenAI announced a $7 billion data-center project in Michigan, the largest investment in state history. The arrival of some of the world’s richest companies has left many communities with hallmarks of past boomtowns in oil country and beyond.
In northeast Oregon, thousands of construction workers descended on RV parks and hotels to build a regional data-center hub for Amazon Web Services. The project pipeline is so long that some newcomers have put down roots.
Local budgets ballooned with Amazon-linked revenues and taxes from new residents. Business surged for suppliers of concrete and fencing. The need for technicians, electricians and more has helped mint new members of the middle class in a job market previously geared toward manual labor in fields and warehouses and factory work turning the region’s bountiful potato harvests into french fries.
Growth has also brought some pain. The costs of housing and child care are rising beyond reach for many blue-collar people. New demand for services and infrastructure has left local governments rushing to keep up. In Umatilla, a public spat over how to manage a deluge of new revenue devolved into a legal fight between the mayor and other city leaders.
Each of the region’s nine data-center sites took years to plan and construct. Economic-impact studies commissioned by local governments project that AI-driven megaprojects could help the roster of campuses reach 17 in the years ahead. Washington-based Sabey Data Centers is designing a facility in Umatilla, while officials say they’ve had talks with other developers not named Amazon.
“We’re open for business,” said Mark Morgan, assistant city manager in Hermiston, whose roughly 20,000 residents make it the largest community in the region.The rush to both attract and accommodate development has pushed local officials to seek out home builders, dole out grants and loans to businesses and construct roads and water systems—infrastructure, in some cases, financed by Amazon.
Umatilla City Manager Dave Stockdale said in an interview at his office in the city’s spruced-up downtown that managing growth has strained his tiny bureaucracy. As the government’s annual budget surged from about $7 million in 2011 to $144 million in the past fiscal year, its head count more than doubled to over 80.
“This is a good problem to have,” he said.
The city is betting that AI is still in its infancy and more development will come. Ticking through a backlog of projects, Stockdale said he is guided by a belief shared by many officials in Oregon and elsewhere who are increasingly looking to data centers for a boost.
“If your city is not growing,” he said, “it is dying.”