Quincy Cashes in on the Cloud

Holder Construction is three weeks into the creation of a 350,000-square-foot building that will house thousands of servers capable of storing data and delivering software and other computing tasks. Dell, the computer maker behind the project, is spending $1 billion in two years to erect data centers around the world. It joins such companies as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Intuit, and Sabey that have purchased land in Quincy to build data centers to capitalize on the boom in demand for computing provided via the Internet, over the so-called cloud.

The biggest names in innovation are building a digital

The biggest names in innovation are building a digital, 21st century equivalent of the railroad. And such as some cities benefited disproportionately from the location of rail lines and stations a century and a half ago, small towns in rural America are angling to cash in on the boom this time around.

Quincy officials say the data center building boom is helping them buck the trend. Real estate prices are rising, and tax revenue surged to $2.24 million last year, from $700,000 in 2005, according to City Administrator Tim Snead. Quincy recently spent $1 million on a new library and $75,000 for a new museum parking lot. It repaved 60 percent of the streets, bought a hook-and-ladder truck for the fire department, and erected an edifice for such services as the management of parks and water.

The country

Quincy as well faces increasing competition for data center building projects from cities around the country. Virginia, Wyoming, New York, Missouri, and Iowa are among the states whose rural areas have attracted innovation giants. Google, Apple and Facebook have all broken ground in small towns in North Carolina.

Washington's biggest rivalry may lie in neighboring Oregon. Quincy lost out to Prineville, 287 miles to the south, to become the site of a data center for Facebook. As the world's largest social network, Facebook needs more servers to store a growing number of photos, videos, and other information posted to user profile pages.

To keep cities like Quincy from losing out henceforth, the state approved a 15-month, 7.9 percent sales-tax break on any computing and power equipment that will be used there. Unlike many cities, Quincy doesn't offer property tax breaks.

Companies are as well attracted to Quincy by bargain real estate prices, plentiful fiber-optic network connections, and low-cost electricity produced by hydropower. To illustrate, electricity in Quincy costs 2.85% per kilowatt hour. By contrast, in Melville, a small town on Long Island, New York, that's as well the site of data centers, electricity costs 25.59% per kilowatt hour, according to a report last year by the Boyd Company, a consulting firm.

The area bring business to local restaurants

Construction workers in the area bring business to local restaurants, just as Zack's Pizza and the Grainery, a sandwich store. Debbie Henne, owner of Rob's Video, around the corner from City Hall, says she has noticed more construction workers coming in at night to rent videos. She has lived in Quincy her whole life and remembers a time when downtown businesses were thriving. She says she hopes to see that again.