Meta, formerly Facebook, plans to build a big center in Boise area. What we know
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Meta comes to Idaho
The social media giant Meta, formerly Facebook, announced its plan for a large data center in Kuna that will bring jobs, infrastructure improvements to the area.
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Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, will build a giant data center in Kuna, a project the state says represents an investment of $800 million.
The technology center will bring 1,200 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs to the Boise suburb, the Idaho Department of Commerce said Wednesday.
Mayor Joe Stear said the project will give Kuna a giant boost in industrial development that he hopes will help attract other companies to the city of about 27,000 people.
“We don’t have a freeway running through us,” Stear said at a news conference. “It wasn’t a great place to put giant businesses. We have worked very long and hard to figure out a way to create an industrial park that works for the city. Meta has made that possible.”
The social media company plans to break ground in September on the nearly 1 million-square-foot server farm at the northeast corner of Cole and Kuna Mora roads, Idaho Commerce said in a news release. Construction is expected to take two years, said Darcy Nothnagle, Meta’s director of community and economic development.
Meta said the center would be its 15th in the U.S. and 19th in the world to help support Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other Meta services. “They support Meta’s mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” Meta says on a new Facebook page for the Kuna center.
“Meta’s decision to make this $800 million investment in Kuna will create high-quality jobs and increased opportunities for the city and the Treasure Valley,” Commerce Director Tom Kealey said. “They will create increased capacity for the city and open further opportunities for more economic development.”
The company plans to begin posting job listings in a couple of weeks for both construction and permanent jobs, Nothnagle said. The Meta jobs will be posted on the company’s careers page, while construction contractor Hensel Phelps will post its openings on its website.
“The kinds of skills and job profiles that we’re looking for really run the gamut,” she said. “It’s everything from computer programmers to electrical engineers to HVAC specialists to security to culinary to landscaping.”
Nothangle declined to say how much Meta would pay its data center workers.
“We don’t share salary ranges, but there are competitive, high-paying jobs,” she said.
The company pledged to spend $50 million to build a sewer and water system to be turned over to the city of Kuna to own and operate. The system will serve the plant but it also will benefit other new users and businesses, Idaho Commerce said.
This will be Boise area’s 1st big data center
Big companies like Meta, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple have been building data centers around the country for years as internet usage and traffic grows. Now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, the need for such centers is rising even more.
But few have been built in Idaho. Boise has at least a couple of small ones: Involta, based in Iowa, operates two centers totaling 40,000 square feet. Fiberpipe, founded in Boise but now owned by a Utah company, runs a 45,000-square-foot center off West Emerald Street near Five Mile Road.
Idaho has some characteristics that can help keep data-center operators’ costs down. The centers use a lot of electricity, and Idaho Power’s electricity is cheaper than most, thanks largely to the utility’s reliance on hydropower. Meta will be the first customer to take part in a program by Idaho Power that will assign only “renewable energy from new resources” to the Meta center.
Idaho also has few natural disasters such as earthquakes big enough to damage buildings, and its climate is temperate enough that most of the year, little artificial chilling is needed to keep servers from overheating.
“Our cooling system relies on outside air for cooling for at least 50% of the year,” Meta said in its Facebook post.
The Boise area still has plenty of undeveloped land, too, such as the site Meta will build on.
Meta takes advantage of big Idaho sales-tax break
Significantly, the state now offers data center operators a tax break that Meta is taking: Since July 2020, new data centers with at least $250 million in investment and employing at least 30 people have been eligible for a sales tax exemption on server equipment and construction materials.
Meta’s center would more than meet those requirements. Applying the exemption from Idaho’s 6% sales tax to an $800 million investment could save the company $48 million.
“That has made us more competitive for data centers,” Kealey said in an interview. “We’ve been working with Meta for a number of years confidentially, and that they’ve chosen this site is very positive for the state, for the city of Kuna and for the region.”
All those servers and accompanying equipment require enormous sums of money, but the centers employ relatively few people, and they do little to foster local tech cultures or startups.
The rise in such centers has already had a different impact in Boise: Data centers have brought business to MIcron Technology Inc., whose memory chips are essential components of them. Micron is one of the world’s top makers of the data storage these centers use.
This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 10:00 AM.
