Nearly a quarter of the electricity Oregonians buy now goes into data centers. A new report puts the share at about 23% of the state’s retail electricity sales in 2025.
It is the first time researchers in Portland have counted the industry in full. The report, from ECOnorthwest and the University of Virginia and funded by the Portland-based Lemelson Foundation, was released on Thursday. Oregon Public Broadcasting got the key findings ahead of publication.
Oregon has 111 operating facilities, with roughly 22.1 million square feet of gross building space. Another 32 are planned or under construction, adding about 6.9 million square feet.
Two markets, one state
Terry Wirkkala, project director and applied economist at ECOnorthwest, told OPB the aim is to inform the public while data centers are a hot topic. His main finding: the state really has two data center markets. “The east side of the state is currently built out more than the west side of the state,” he said, though future growth will come mostly on the west.
The east holds the hyperscale giants, often bigger than several football fields. The western projects are much smaller. Many serve multiple companies renting space, and some share buildings with offices.
Who works there
Few people do. Data centers employ 2,630 workers directly, about 0.2% of a workforce of roughly 1.97 million. Of those, 2,205 are in Eastern Oregon. In Morrow County, hyperscale data centers directly employ more than 10% of the local workforce.
Even that count was hard to get. The centers lean on outside contractors to build facilities and service equipment, so the researchers had to piece their numbers together from several sources.
Power and money
The authors stop short of making recommendations, but they note that Oregon’s grid is likely unprepared for rising demand. Meeting large-load growth, they wrote, will require new electricity resources, transmission capacity and coordinated planning.
João Ferreira, acting director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center, worked on the study. He expects consumption to reach nearly 25 terawatt hours by 2030, enough to power about 2.5 million homes. “We expect this number to grow up to 31, 32% by 2030,” he told OPB, referring to data centers’ share of Oregon’s electricity demand. Forecasting is difficult, he said, because the smaller western facilities serve several clients on an as-needed basis and so are less predictable through the day, while hyperscale sites used partly for AI tend to run constantly.
On tax, companies paid $60.2 million in property taxes on operating data centers in 2025. Exemptions likely range from $230 million to $450 million. The authors cautioned that exempted taxes should not automatically be read as revenue local governments would otherwise have received.
The report also found inconsistent, incomplete or unavailable data on water use and other factors needed to judge effects on surrounding land and communities. Tax breaks helped fuel the build-out, but in recent months local communities have considered or adopted moratoriums, and data centers have become a key issue before the November election.
