Sabey Planning $950M Data Center Campus In Emerging Oregon Market

Sabey Data Centers has purchased 60 acres for a major new data center campus along Oregon's Columbia River, an emerging submarket that has drawn the attention of Amazon and Google. 

Seattle-based Sabey plans to spend an estimated $950M developing the campus in Umatilla, Oregon. A pair of buildings totaling 700K SF and offering more than 100 megawatts of data center capacity are planned for the campus, Commercial Property Executive reported. Construction is set to begin in the first quarter of 2025.

The developer paid close to $3M to acquire the site in the largely rural community of Umatilla, located on the Columbia River on Oregon’s northeast border. 

According to Sabey, which operates six multitenant campuses in the U.S., the Umatilla facility will provide modular and build-to-suit options targeting both enterprise and hyperscale tenants. It will be Sabey’s first data center in Oregon, although half of the company’s existing campuses are in Washington, just across the Columbia River from Umatilla. 

The Columbia River region has become a key part of the data center industry’s growing footprint in Oregon. 

The state’s primary data center hub remains the Portland suburb of Hillsboro, which is one of the world's fastest-growing data center hot spots and accounted for the lion’s share of the region’s 186 MW of new leasing in the first half of this year, according to JLL. Hillsboro’s inventory is set to more than double in the coming months, according to CBRE, with projects underway from companies like Flexential and Crane Data Centers. 

But hyperscale tech giants and third-party data center providers like Sabey are increasingly building large facilities far from Hillsboro in communities along the Columbia River on Oregon’s northern border. Umatilla is a 203-mile drive east of the state’s data center capital. Just 20 miles downriver in the Port of Morrow, Amazon is building five new data centers in a $12B investment the tech giant announced earlier this year. Google also operates a large data center in the riverfront community of The Dalles, located around 80 miles downriver from Umatilla.

“Cloud providers and large tech companies have started to establish a new data center zone in north-central Oregon, as a complementary market to the nearby Hillsboro hub,” Sabey Director of Marketing Teddy Otero told Commercial Property Executive.