The first thing visitors approaching Quincy, Washington see is dry rolling hills, cleaved by the Columbia River. The second, a sign laying claim to the title of the nation's "leading potato producing county." But today, Quincy is known for a more lucrative commodity: vast stretches of data centers powering the modern internet and artificial intelligence boom.
Data centers make everything from ChatGPT to online medical records possible. The appetite for ever more internet-connected things and AI applications is leading to a boom in data center building across the country. Fueled by hundreds of billions in capital expenditures and enthusiasm from the Trump administration, the data center bonanza offers a tempting promise: that small towns could find a new industrial anchor, bringing good jobs, tax revenue, and prosperity to swaths of the country that have been left behind by the digital revolution.
But there's a cost. Data centers have significant power and water demands that can stress small towns, and they employ fewer people than the factories of the past. As they race toward a future that's difficult to predict, communities across the country are weighing the costs and benefits of becoming a data center town, which can vary depending on the resources and character of each place.
In many ways, the Columbia River has lightened the impact on Quincy, but even there, critics say that the long-term strain on resources isn't worth the economic gain.
It's been 18 years since the first data centers went up in this place – and they're still being built. The town provides a window into what can happen when the data center industry sets up shop in a small community – and what local residents stand to gain or lose.
Data center boomtown
Quincy proper is a majority hispanic agricultural community of about 7,500 people, three hours east of Seattle. In the years since the first data centers went up, the share of Quincy residents living below the poverty line has gone from 29.4% in 2012 to 13.1% in 2023, according to census data.
As a lifelong central Washington resident, Lisa Karstetter described Quincy as the kind of town young people moved out of in search of opportunity. She said she's seen that change in the years since Microsoft and Yahoo opened their first data centers in 2007.
Yahoo hired Karstetter to manage community relations in Quincy the following year. After that, she went on to do the same job for Microsoft. Karstetter said the data center industry and agriculture had "a beautiful marriage," bringing needed tax revenue to the small farming community. (It's also the story of her own marriage. Her husband farms cherries, apples and pears.)
" First time ever in my history of living in Quincy, we had a full police force because they could afford it," she said. "New fire station, new library, you had all of these things come in that could support the agriculture."
Data centers pay about 75% of Quincy's property tax revenue, according to Alex Ybarra, a Republican state legislator who grew up in the town. That's helped fund a range of new public amenities.
The most recent addition is the Quincy Valley Medical Center, which opened its doors in May. The hospital offers emergency services, wound care, imaging and a new physical therapy center complete with a pool.
In the waiting room, Julie Pickering reflected on the benefits of having a state of the art wound care clinic closer to home. For the past four years, she and her husband have commuted more than an hour to care for his partially amputated foot, which refused to heal.
" This new hospital's been a blessing to everyone in the community and surroundings," she said.
Quincy High School was also recently renovated thanks to a $108 million bond, the majority of which was funded by property taxes on data centers. It serves about 850 students, most of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch.
" It wouldn't have been possible without the data center presence here in our community and the support of voters that helped us pass it," said Superintendent Nik Bergman.
The home of the Jackrabbits has a gleaming new auditorium and athletic facilities, including a weight room with panoramic windows. The school also has a comprehensive career and technical training department, offering courses in everything from wildfire science to computer programming. Students planning to go into one of the two big industries in town can graduate with a data center technician certificate or raise their own pigs and goats to sell at the fair.
"It's exposing kids to different pathways," said Bergman. "When they leave Quincy, they have an idea of what pathway they want to go on."
Short-term versus long-terms jobs
While there's no shortage of farming jobs in Quincy, it's unclear how many data center jobs will be available to these students.
The construction of data centers creates thousands of jobs, but they're mostly temporary. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates the average large data center employs about 150 people long-term.
Microsoft would not disclose how many people it employs in Quincy, but said it has 21 data center buildings in town and each of those buildings can employ 40-50 people.
Some of those are leased from third parties like Sabey Data Centers. Sabey's sprawling Quincy campus employs 250 people according to Ryan Beebout, vice president of the western region. He says that in a small town, hundreds of jobs aren't negligible.
Beebout also noted that an entry-level data center technician earns about $60,000 per year and doesn't need a college degree. That's nearly double the individual median income for Quincy.
Water and hydropower are plentiful … but not limitless
There are some who say that the economic gains don't outweigh the downsides these data centers bring to central Washington.
Patty Martin is an environmental activist who served as mayor of Quincy before the first data center went up. At six feet tall, the former student athlete cuts a no-nonsense figure. Her advocacy partner, Danna Dal Porto, is petite and convivial, though the retired schoolteacher has no problem looking up at public officials to give them a piece of her mind.
" It's fairly well known that corporations like this choose low income rural areas for a couple of reasons," Dal Porto said. "One, they assume that the population is uneducated. They assume that the population won't be involved in resisting them, and usually, rural property is less expensive. Usually, rural governments are looking for investment. And so it's a perfect storm."
Initially Martin and Dal Porto worried about air pollution from diesel back up generators power centers use and fought for rules requiring pollution controls on the generator smoke.
Data center companies say the generators are rarely used in Quincy because hydropower from the Columbia is so reliable. Sabey Data Centers runs its generators about eight hours a year, according to Beebout.
Today Martin and Dal Porto are most concerned about the water and energy data centers use, and they fear the building boom could undermine Washington state's climate goals.
" It's great to look at the economic benefits," Martin said. "That's a snapshot in time. That's something you benefit from right now. The question is, what's the long-term effect?"
So far, the Columbia River has sustained the growth of these data centers. Its dams supply cheap, abundant hydropower energy and water for cooling them. But Martin worries about increasingly less snowpack to feed the river as the climate gets warmer.
" I just think that sometimes we're a little bit too shortsighted," Martin said.
In Grant County, home to Quincy, hydropower and water are maxed out, according to City Administrator Pat Haley.
But these resource constraints have done little to quell demand. The Grant County Public Utility District says they have 79 pending applications in their queue, most of which are for data center projects. The utility says the combined power for all of those applicants would be roughly double the demand for the entire city of Seattle.
Martin worries that if push comes to shove, residents will experience blackouts or limited water before data centers do, "because they have sensitive information."
"You don't cool it, it's gonna overheat … You turn off the power … it's gonna go away. So, it's all about the data centers."
The Grant County Public Utility District says residents shouldn't be concerned about losing power, because it has the ability to buy more on the open market at peak usage times. But some of that power comes from fossil fuels and may soon be off the table. A state law requires utilities to be carbon neutral in five years, and run exclusively on renewables by 2045.
To feed growing demand, Haley said the Port of Quincy is considering becoming its own utility, and building new natural gas facilities to supply the growing appetite for power. Ybarra, the state legislator, is lobbying the governor to create a carve out to the clean energy law for natural gas if the carbon is sequestered.
Martin says that would undermine the state's goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions 95% by 2050.
"I'm concerned that as that electrical energy need expands, that there is no type of electrical production that would be off the table," Martin said.
Across the country, other data center clusters are going up that don't have the abundant power and water supplied by the Columbia River. In Northern Virginia, home to the world's largest cluster, power demand is expected to double in the next 15 years. Like in Washington, the local utility is considering building new gas plants to meet demand despite a state law requiring carbon-free power generation by 2045. In Georgia, the story of a couple whose taps ran dry when a Meta data center moved in next door went viral. Water use is an acute concern for clusters popping up in drought-stricken southwest cities.
Microsoft says it is investing in closed-loop water recycling so that facilities using the technology will not require additional groundwater once they're up and running.
And data center companies are also betting big on new sources of energy to feed their data centers' growing power demands, like nuclear fusion, which promises to be emissionless, cheap, and abundant – though skeptics doubt it's close to becoming commercially viable.
Microsoft also says that there are more mature renewable power sources coming online that will lighten the load on the region's hydropower supply, like wind and solar. The cost of building those facilities is expected to rise, however, since Congress axed tax credits for them earlier this month.
When the gold rush ends
Tax revenue isn't the only economic boost the data center boom has brought to Quincy. New businesses are cropping up to serve the growing population and traveling construction workers drawn to the region by consistent union work.
Sharyl Smith opened Monkey 'N' Around Pizza three years ago in honor of her late grandson. The menu includes pizzas named after his favorite things, like the T-Rex and the Batman. Smith also serves a daily barbeque special catering to the builders.
" The town that I'm from has a lot of traveling construction workers, and I've made really good friends with them," Smith said as a steady stream of electricians rolled in for the union's weekly brotherhood night.
As Smith worked the bar, Steve Cecil and Pat Gallatin settled into a hightop. They'd both just clocked out from a Microsoft job site in the nearby town of Malaga, where they've been working as electricians. Originally from Tennessee, Cecil has been in central Washington for two years "chasing data centers." He and Gallatin often travel to job sites together.
" The first data center I worked on here was in 2006 or 2005, and it was a sleepy little farming community," Gallatin said. "And since then, I bet you there's 20 data centers or better in the area. So that's put thousands of construction workers to work pretty much every year since 2005."
But for the pick and shovel businesses that have cropped up to supply the prospectors, there's a fear that all gold rushes end eventually.
"It's a little scary," Smith said. "I'm not from here … so I don't have the community support of being raised here and having all those connections … my connections are the construction workers."
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