AWS Boardman Bombing Range data center, Boardman, Oregon

Amazon Web Services is building a data center on the west side of Bombing Range Road near Boardman, Morrow County, Oregon, south of the Highway 730 and Interstate 84 interchange. County filings from 2022 described four single-story buildings of 215,461 square feet each, plus a water treatment building, storage tanks and a security building, and the project cleared county zoning that March. The campus is under construction; filings said the first phase would build one data center and ancillary buildings, with Umatilla Electric Cooperative building an on-site substation.

Amazon has been building data centers in Boardman since about 2011 and said in 2022 its Morrow County sites employed 461 people at an average wage of about $75,000. In May 2023 the Port of Morrow approved enterprise zone tax breaks worth about $1 billion for five new Amazon data centers, including this one. The deal exempts Amazon from nearly three-quarters of the property taxes other businesses pay, while the company pays about $5 million in community fees per project at construction and about $110,000 a year per data center to local schools and emergency services.

Two Port of Morrow commissioners who owned Windwave Communications, a fiber supplier to Amazon's data centers, voted on the incentive deal; state ethics staff later sought penalties against three former officials over the conflict. Morrow County Commission chair David Sykes has defended the tax deals as a way to diversify an economy that lost its sawmill jobs and the Boardman coal plant. Amazon has not publicly said when each Bombing Range Road building will be finished.