The high prairie of Central Washington draws visitors from all over...

Climbers come for the crags of the coulees, oenophiles come for the Columbia Valley wines and concertgoers show up in droves for The Gorge Amphitheatre, one of the country’s most scenic venues.

Despite all of this traffic through the region, it’s possible to overlook the agricultural town of Quincy, WA. Seeming like many other quiet towns in Central Washington, you’d be excused if you passed through without realizing that you were in the epicenter of one of the PNW’s largest data center hubs.

Though you might not see the full extent of the data center presence from the main highway, a satellite map of Quincy will reveal several massive data center campuses. Enterprise and hyperscale colocation providers have made strategic decisions to build data centers in Quincy, Washington, and neighboring East Wenatchee.

For the last decade, Sabey has been an integral part of this data center boom.

In 2011, Sabey Data Centers opened the doors of its first data center campus in Quincy, and that campus remains one of our most successful properties to date. After twelve years in the region, we’d like to share what we’ve learned and what makes Central Washington such a special place for data centers.

Central Washington Energy

Clean and inexpensive hydroelectric power is a hallmark of Central Washington, with prices as low as 3.9 cents per kWH driving the total cost of ownership (TCO) for data centers to among the lowest in the country.

Sourcing natural, renewable and reliable power is only half of our commitment to sustainability; using that power as responsibly as possible is the other half. SDC has made it our goal to obtain net-zero carbon by 2029. As a testament to our commitment, we’ve been awarded the GOLD level for Green Lease Leaders year after year.

And Quincy is one of our most energy-efficient campuses in our energy-efficient portfolio, scoring 99’s for all three buildings in operation by Energy Star (a system that ranks buildings of similar use from 1-100 for energy efficiency compared against each other).

Saving 6 million kW of energy annually, the campus was also awarded the highest-ever Power Players Award from the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA).

Central Washington Geography

In addition to inexpensive, renewable energy and peerless efficiency, our tenants at SDC Quincy (and the nearby SDC Columbia data center in East Wenatchee) also enjoy benefits of the region, such as seismic stability and a moderate climate that allows for free cooling for 90% of the year.

Washington’s available rural real estate also lends itself well to the large footprint of data centers. SDC Quincy provides 528,000 square feet of purpose-built colocation space across three strategically designed buildings, offering modular efficiency for users of virtually any size, including hyperscalers. Built-to-suit powered shell, hybrid configurations, and wholesale turnkey colocation module options exist, all managed by our award-winning critical environment management team.

Plus, as it turns out, what’s good for data centers is also good for people! Part of our mission at Sabey is to give back to the communities we work and live in. Between food drives and several educational outreach programs in the Quincy area, we strive to do our part to enrich the community that has so warmly welcomed us. We hire locally and our employees, and those of our tenants, enjoy a small-town, mountain lifestyle in Central Washington, including limitless outdoor recreation possibilities. Data centers provide new avenues of economic growth to a primarily agriculture-based community, giving young people fulfilling careers in tech right in their hometowns. Plus, the data center influx has been a boon for the ever-growing tourism industry.

Central Washington Connectivity

SDC Quincy offers access to multiple network carriers, including Comcast, NoaNet, Wave Broadband, Ziply Fiber and Startouch. The facility also grants tenants access to dark fiber providers such as Zayo and Lumen. With an Azure Express Route node and Megaport for SDN, Quincy connects tenants to all of the major cloud services. To support the diverse connectivity requirements of tenants, SDC Quincy delivers multiple telecom services, diverse Points of Entry, dark fiber, Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), point-to-point and on-ramps to the cloud.

Quincy may seem like a quiet town in the Washington high prairie, but it’s one of the most connected places in the country thanks to the booming data center growth Sabey is helping to spur.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published December 2017 and has been updated for accuracy.