Guide · Focus Areas
Oregon's AI data center landscape
Yes — there are AI data centers in Oregon, and a lot of them. The state is one of the most important physical hubs of the modern internet, and increasingly of the AI economy. This guide maps the major hubs, the structural reasons operators keep choosing Oregon, and what it means for the state's role in AI.
Where Oregon's data centers are
Oregon's data center footprint splits cleanly into two zones: a dense urban cluster in Hillsboro on the west side of the Cascades, and a much larger landmass of hyperscale campuses east of the mountains, strung along the Columbia River and the high desert.
Hillsboro
Washington CountyOregon's primary internet gateway. Hillsboro hosts a dense cluster of hyperscale and colocation facilities operated by Meta, QTS, Digital Realty, Flexential, and others, plus the subsea cable landings that connect the Pacific Northwest to Asia. The Silicon Forest's fiber density, power capacity, and proximity to Intel's fabs make it the natural home for AI inference and low-latency workloads serving the western United States.
Prineville
Crook CountyHome to Meta's flagship campus — one of the largest data center developments in the world — and a major Apple campus. Prineville's high desert climate enables aggressive free-air cooling, and the region's industrial-zoned land has allowed both companies to expand repeatedly. The campuses are central to training and serving the AI features in Meta's and Apple's consumer products.
The Dalles
Wasco CountyGoogle's original Oregon campus, opened in 2006 along the Columbia River. The site has expanded several times and now anchors a growing cluster supporting Google Cloud and AI workloads. Hydroelectric power from the Columbia and access to cold river water for cooling were the original draw and remain key advantages.
Umatilla & Boardman
Morrow and Umatilla CountiesAmazon Web Services operates a large multi-site footprint across Morrow and Umatilla counties that forms a meaningful share of the US-West-2 region — one of AWS's most-used regions globally and a workhorse for AI training and inference on services like Bedrock and SageMaker.
Why operators choose Oregon
Abundant, low-carbon power
Federal hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, plus a fast-growing fleet of utility-scale wind and solar in eastern Oregon, give operators access to some of the cheapest and lowest-carbon electricity in the country.
Climate and cooling
Cool nights east of the Cascades and access to river water along the Columbia enable evaporative and free-air cooling for much of the year — a significant operating-cost advantage for the dense, hot GPU racks that AI training depends on.
Fiber and subsea cables
Hillsboro is one of the most important subsea cable landing points on the US west coast, with direct routes to Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia — putting Oregon a few milliseconds closer to Asia than California for cross-Pacific AI traffic.
Enterprise zones and tax policy
Oregon's long-running Strategic Investment Program and county-level enterprise zones have offered multi-decade property-tax abatements in exchange for capital investment and local fee payments — the policy backbone of nearly every major campus in the state.
What this means for AI in Oregon
Oregon's role in AI is not abstract. A meaningful share of the training runs, model weights, and inference requests behind the assistants and agents people use every day move through racks in Prineville, The Dalles, Umatilla, and Hillsboro. That gives the state real leverage — and real responsibility — on questions that sit at the center of the AI debate: grid capacity, water use, community benefit agreements, workforce development, and the governance of the infrastructure layer itself.
The Coalition's view: Oregon's hardware roots are an asset, not a footnote. The same hydro, fiber, and engineering talent that built the Silicon Forest are what make the state credible as a place to build, deploy, and govern AI responsibly.
Working on data center policy, siting, or workforce?
The Coalition is convening operators, utilities, local governments, and community groups around Oregon's AI infrastructure. We'd like to hear from you.
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