Meta Prineville data center, Prineville, Oregon

Meta's Prineville campus in Crook County, Oregon began construction in 2010, when the sawmill town's economy was struggling, and has grown into the company's largest data center campus in the country. The campus is operating, and Meta says it has invested more than $2 billion in Oregon, employed up to 1,000 skilled trade workers at peak construction, and supports more than 350 operational jobs.

The deal that brought it was a full property tax exemption under Oregon's Long-Term Rural Enterprise Zone program, created in 1985. Crook County assessor Jon Soliz puts the exempted value at more than $130 million a year, and Good Jobs First put the cost of the tax breaks to Oregon schools at $275 million in 2024. What the city collects instead is utility fees, which rose from about $430,000 in 2011 to about $11 million in 2026.

Prineville now wants a different bargain. City manager Steve Forrester told a state advisory committee on June 26, 2026 that the city expects to roughly double its property tax revenue once the exemptions expire, the first in 2027, and city leaders say they will probably not grant a full tax break to the next data center that asks. In early June 2026 the Oregon legislature imposed a one year pause on the tax exemption program.

On June 28, 2026, 66 workers at Meta's campus lost their jobs after the company ended a contract with an IT services contractor; Meta said it plans to rehire most of them through a different firm. "To me it hurts the economy, it doesn't help the economy. It's not like it's benefitting us from having that up there," said Karl Wilkerson, co-owner of Dad's Place, a Prineville diner. "We're not like Prineville," said Mickey Killingsworth, treasurer of the Jefferson County Farm Bureau. "We don't support data centers."

Meta's campus used 70 million gallons of water in 2024, about the same as 420 Prineville households used in 2021. Meta says it aims to restore 200 percent of the water the campus consumes to local watersheds, working with the Crooked River Watershed Council and the Deschutes River Conservancy.