Facebook has had a huge day! Not only did they have their IPO, but they also dodged a huge bullet today when the Oregon Governor signed a bill today that assesses big data centers for taxes on their local value, not on intangible assets like their national brand. The biil known as the “Facebook Bill” will be signed into law at Facebook’s data center in Pineville, OR.
Now that this bill is going to be signed, Facebook can, and will probably, build a second data center. The new data center will be a “green” data center that uses “innovative cooling techniques to conserve energy.” The big public platform enables Facebook to push its Open Data Center Alliance strategy which is a “consortium of leading global IT organizations with a common view of the requirements and challenges facing next generation data center and cloud infrastructure innovation.”
This bill will also open up the possibility that other big tech companies such as Google and Microsoft will also build data centers in Oregon. This move would be great for those companies saving them a ton of money and bring much needed jobs to the state.
Mix this tax break in with the fact that Oregon has no sales tax and it could be a great place to work for some people. If only their property taxes weren’t so dang high.