AWS Threemile Exascale data center, Morrow County, Oregon

Amazon Web Services has proposed what would be Oregon's first exascale data center campus in Morrow County, on former grazing land near the Boardman Airport south of the Columbia River. Threemile Canyon Farms, the dairy operation that owned the land, filed a land use application with the county before Amazon bought the roughly 1,300 acre site in March 2026. The application describes 4 million square feet of data centers in 16 to 20 buildings, priced at $8 billion to $12 billion and drawing 1,000 megawatts of power.

Pacific Power told the county it could serve the site using transmission lines already permitted for other data centers nearby. The application seeks access to 35 million gallons of water a year from the Port of Morrow, up to 1,300 gallons a minute at peak, in a county already fighting nitrate contamination in its drinking water from decades of large scale farming. “We can find 1,300 gallons per minute for an exascale data center? It just doesn't make sense,” said Kaleb Lay, policy director at Oregon Rural Action.

Amazon already runs about 800 acres of data centers around Boardman, and Oregon's land conservation agency has counted 9,100 acres of new data center land moving through the pipeline statewide. Morrow County has approved more than $1 billion in tax breaks for other Amazon sites; this application has none yet, though it says Amazon would likely seek relief through the state's Strategic Investment Program. County commission chair David Sykes said he knew of no incentive discussions for the site.

Amazon has confirmed the purchase and told GeekWire its “development plans are not final” as it carries out its normal due diligence. The land use application remains before Morrow County, which will decide whether to approve it.