SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. on Monday opened the doors of a massive data center in central Washington, turning what was once a bean farm into a “server farm.”
The data center, based in Quincy is about 474,000 square feet and is surrounded on three sides by fields of potatoes, beans and broccoli. The undisclosed number of servers inside is now online, handling Internet traffic to Microsoft’s Hotmail e-mail program, instant messaging and other tools.
The server farm is the first of six Microsoft has planned for Quincy; construction for No. 2 is under way, but beyond that, growth will be “tied to adoption of online services,” said Michael Manos, a senior director of data center services at Microsoft.
“As our products become more and more popular, as we do more and more things in our online space, there will be natural growth of these facilities,” he added.
Last year, Web portal business Yahoo Inc. said it also planned a Quincy server farm; earlier this month, Google Inc. announced plans to invest $600 million to build a similar data center in South Carolina.
Manos declined to say how many server farms Microsoft currently operates, but said this is the first the company built from scratch, and now owns and operates.
He said the facility uses hydroelectric power exclusively, and the second facility is being built with construction machines that only burn biodiesel.
Microsoft’s has said that the Quincy data center created a minimum of about 35 jobs, a number that will grow as use of Microsoft’s online services increases, Manos said. The company’s online services have been underscored in speeches by high-level executives in recent months.
“Data centers typically bring more data centers,” said Manos, followed by the companies that provide generators, cooling and other technology and services, which will help add diversity to the local economy. “There were definitely a lot of smiling faces all around here,” he said.
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