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Residents, politicians and local agencies are making the most of the tech boom, but prosperity comes with costs; ‘What’s going to happen once they stop building?
By David Uberti • November 3, 2025 • 9 pm
UMATILLA, ORE.—Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, like many people on the frontier of America’s tech boom, is basking in newfound prosperity.
Her hometown in northeast Oregon was not long ago known for a former chemical-weapons depot nearby, a state prison on the city’s outskirts and the strip clubs once dotting its main drag. But a growing fleet of Amazon data centers has turned the region around Umatilla into an unlikely nerve center for one of the most expensive infrastructure build-outs in U.S. history.
The tech giant has pumped jobs, people and money into the community of roughly 8,000, doubling many home prices and enticing builders to etch new neighborhoods into surrounding hillsides. That means dollar signs for Realtors like Leon-Tejeda.
The daughter of Mexican-born farmhands, Leon-Tejeda worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center before qualifying for a real-estate license. Now, she is on pace to close 35 deals this year. The 35-year-old aims to raise her kids in a soon-to-be-built house overlooking the Columbia River and has her eye on Airbnb investments to cash in on the region’s growth.
“It’s a family victory and God’s blessing,” she said of her new home. “People are wanting to come to Umatilla now.”
America’s tech build-out has minted millionaires in Silicon Valley, helped a record-breaking stock market defy gravity and buoyed an otherwise uncertain U.S. economy. Investment in software and information-processing equipment drove most of America’s GDP growth in the first half of 2025, according to federal data. The top five tech giants—known as hyperscalers in the data-center world—total more than a third of all S&P 500 capital expenditures.
Companies are throwing money at digital innovation to become more profitable with fewer workers down the road. But the sheer scale of investment has obscured how it is already reshaping America, in the form of windowless buildings the size of multiple football fields where businesses store and process information.
That development is injecting vast sums of cash into sometimes unexpected cornersof the country—many of them bypassed by previous boomtimes.
The avalanche of money, which most recent federal data put at $41 billion in annual investment, isn’t spread evenly. Goldman Sachs estimated roughly 72% of all server-farm capacity sat in just 1% of counties as of July.
Some wonder how long it will last. Leon-Tejeda shares concerns growing more common in Washington and on Wall Street that America’s increasingly AI-crazed tech race might stall. The difference for her is that any fallout would hit home.
“Sometimes I do worry: What’s going to happen once they stop building?” she said. “Not everyone is going to stay here for good.”
Investment in data centers and their immense electricity needs are among the few types of construction spending that have grown over the past year, according to the Commerce Department.
“These hyperscalers are willing to pay top dollar for materials, talent, land, for everything imaginable,” said Anirban Basu, chief economist for the trade group Associated Builders and Contractors.
Corporate America’s push for cloud-storage capacity and AI computing power has set off a similar scramble to land projects by growth-hungry communities stretching from Atlanta suburbs to the Texas prairie to remote corners of North Dakota. Last week, Oracle and OpenAI announced a $7 billion data-center project in Michigan, the largest investment in state history. The arrival of some of the world’s richest companies has left many communities with hallmarks of past boomtowns in oil country and beyond.
In northeast Oregon, thousands of construction workers descended on RV parks and hotels to build a regional data-center hub for Amazon Web Services. The project pipeline is so long that some newcomers have put down roots.
Local budgets ballooned with Amazon-linked revenues and taxes from new residents. Business surged for suppliers of concrete and fencing. The need for technicians, electricians and more has helped mint new members of the middle class in a job market previously geared toward manual labor in fields and warehouses and factory work turning the region’s bountiful potato harvests into french fries.
Growth has also brought some pain. The costs of housing and child care are rising beyond reach for many blue-collar people. New demand for services and infrastructure has left local governments rushing to keep up. In Umatilla, a public spat over how to manage a deluge of new revenue devolved into a legal fight between the mayor and other city leaders.
Each of the region’s nine data-center sites took years to plan and construct. Economic-impact studies commissioned by local governments project that AI-driven megaprojects could help the roster of campuses reach 17 in the years ahead. Washington-based Sabey Data Centers is designing a facility in Umatilla, while officials say they’ve had talks with other developers not named Amazon.
Fears that construction could peter out haven’t deterred towns from tethering their fortunes more tightly to the corporate spending sprees and stratospheric Wall Street valuations that are fueling talk of a bubble. In nearby Hermiston, Ore., where small armies of workers recently toiled at two data-center sites ringed by barbed-wire fences, officials are trying to annex land for additional development in a bet the boom will continue.
“We’re open for business,” said Mark Morgan, assistant city manager in Hermiston, whose roughly 20,000 residents make it the largest community in the region.
“If this is what’s going on right now,” he said of data-center development, “this is what it’s going to be.”
The towns speckling the Columbia River basin have long ridden the ebbs and flows of far-off markets: volatile crop prices, changes in the livestock trade, pressure on the lumber industry.
It’s the river, and the hydroelectric dams that line it in this area, that is helping propel the latest shift in fortune. Umatilla County, which shares a name with a tributary and native people nearby, boasts one of those dams as well as an old munitions depot where the military at times stored chemical agents like sarin in hundreds of bunkers.
AWS began constructing data centers in neighboring Morrow County more than a decade ago. When the tech giant set its sights on Umatilla County, new patrons began trickling into Hermiston restaurants and bars. At Neighbor Dudes, they gave owner Tammy Speelman few details about their work.
“It was like Area 51,” she said, noting that many of her new customers referenced nondisclosure agreements. “It was just hysterical.”
Seemingly nonstop construction has since turned Amazon workers and various contractors into regulars at the watering hole, where Speelman now stocks Texas-made Shiner Bock lager to appeal to transplants.
“Amazon, in two good Thursdays, pays my rent,” Speelman said of weekly employee gatherings.
The company gets a lot in return: big tax breaks and three resources that data centers need in abundance—land, water and power.
For developers, clustering server farms affords faster communication, underpinning everything from certain AI applications to video calls to smooth streaming of Thursday Night Football.
America’s data-center mecca in northern Virginia helps play that role for much of the East Coast. David Tanner, who directs AWS’s regional operations in northeast Oregon, said his area is well-situated to do something similar out West, with existing fiber-optic infrastructure to connect the Bay Area, Portland and Seattle.
The company has helped fund new high-school and college programs in the hope of training students for jobs, such as technicians, that generally pay more than other opportunities. Still, the huge demand for workers is outstripping the local labor force, in many cases forcing AWS and its contractors to look elsewhere for electricians and other key roles.
“Local folks stay longer-term, which is good for business,” Tanner said.
The AWS executive is one of them, climbing the ranks not far from his boyhood home as the company’s regional footprint expanded. “When I was growing up here, I don’t think anyone would have thought that I could have a career like I have in this area,” he said.
The rush to both attract and accommodate development has pushed local officials to seek out home builders, dole out grants and loans to businesses and construct roads and water systems—infrastructure, in some cases, financed by Amazon.
Umatilla City Manager Dave Stockdale said in an interview at his office in the city’s spruced-up downtown that managing growth has strained his tiny bureaucracy. As the government’s annual budget surged from about $7 million in 2011 to $144 million in the past fiscal year, its head count more than doubled to over 80.
“This is a good problem to have,” he said.
The city is betting that AI is still in its infancy and more development will come. Ticking through a backlog of projects, Stockdale said he is guided by a belief shared by many officials in Oregon and elsewhere who are increasingly looking to data centers for a boost.
“If your city is not growing,” he said, “it is dying.”
Most of the value of data centers lies in chips and other technology produced as far away as Taiwan. But construction of each campus still requires as much as hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of labor, cable, piping, copper, power hookups, cooling systems, backup generators and more that coalesce into economic hurricanes currently hitting places like Hermiston.
AWS shares little about how many guards and technicians each data center requires once it’s running, fueling jokes by some residents that security at the facilities rivals the state prison nearby. In Umatilla, where Amazon has already built four separate campuses, surrounding parking lots now stand largely empty.
Consulting firm Johnson Economics estimates that each four-building campus in the area supports as many as 140 full-time workers. Local officials rely on third-party location-tracking software to guess the number of jobs created and where workers lay their heads at night. The data suggests many of them are at least currently living nearby.
Amazon reports it injects billions of dollars annually into the Oregon economy. Tanner pegged the current number of employees and contractors across Umatilla County—a Puerto Rico-sized area home to about 80,000 people—at the equivalent of 3,200 full-time workers. If construction ever slows, that will dwindle.
The small number of permanent jobs may be a feature, not a bug, for some residents who treasure their communities’ small-town feel.
“We were a town where everybody knew everybody,” said Dennis Barnett, a Hermiston accountant and benefactor of its rodeo. “Now, I know nobody.”
The Umatilla School District has started seeing moderate growth in its largely low-income student body after years of stagnation, Superintendent Heidi Sipe said. Students train in robotics and metal fabrication at a gleaming facility. Voters greenlighted a bond for improvements, including a new intermediate school, thanks in part to data center-linked revenue that pushed down residents’ tax increases compared with previous proposed bonds.
“That’s the difference of Amazon,” Sipe said. “But we still have to find the funds for the staffing and operations of those programs.”
Instead of paying property taxes, developers typically make nontax payments to governments totaling millions annually as part of yearslong deals for each data-center campus. In Umatilla, that money is controlled by city and county officials, rather than traditional taxing districts like the schools and fire department.
That has contributed to political strife, including tension over whether to fund new projects or existing services. This year Sipe’s son, Mayor Caden Sipe, sued the city manager and city council members for allegedly infringing his First Amendment rights after they censured him in a dispute centered on spending. Those leaders have denied his accusations and moved to dismiss the suit.
In Heidi Sipe’s view, local agencies like hers are now competing with one another to tap the city’s coffers and reap the full benefits of the boom.
“This feels like a fleeting opportunity,” she said. “When we had no money, we helped each other survive.”
Amazon shows few signs of slowing down on server farms. Chief Executive Andy Jassy said last week the company is on track to double its capacity across AWS by 2027. Outside of Umatilla, local officials are working to ready parts of the old chemical weapons depot for development, potentially opening more land for data centers to come.