Potential community benefits
STORY AND PHOTOS BY RYAN HALL | RURAL MONTANA EDITOR
A drive through small-town Quincy, Washington, makes the community impacts of having several data centers nearby abundantly clear.
A new city hall, police station and public services headquarters were completed in 2020, at a cost of more than $6.5 million; a $14.5 million aquatic center is opening this fall; a recently built $55 million hospital; and a new $84 million high school built in 2019, are among other modern city buildings. There is also the ongoing Q-Plex project — a 143,000-square-foot indoor sports arena with an estimated cost between $20 million and $23 million which is currently under construction.
At a population of around 7,500, Quincy is most comparable to Laurel, Miles City, Whitefish and Sidney in Montana.
So why does Quincy boast more than $200 million in new buildings in the last seven years? Simply put, it’s the robust property tax base brought by the nearby data center campuses.
Quincy Superintendent of Schools Dr. Nik Bergman explained that the high school was built with a $118 million bond approved by voters. The data centers pay 54 percent of all assessed value for such bonds, with remaining businesses and private property/homeowners paying the rest.
“I think it wouldn’t have been possible” to build the new school without data centers, Bergman said. “We would still be in our old school, which was built in 1954.”
State legislator Alex Ybarra has said that data centers account for about 75 percent of Quincy’s property tax revenue, while some working groups say it’s closer to 65 percent. Either way, the property tax impact and the benefits of it are undeniable.
The first data center opened in Quincy in 2006, when the assessed value of the top 10 taxpayers in Grant County was nearly $313 million. As of 2025, the assessed value of the county’s top 10 taxpayers is approximately $6.13 billion, a 1,961 percent increase, according to a report by the Washington State Department of Revenue’s Data Center Workgroup, which was formed by executive order of Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson last year.
There are now seven data center campuses near Quincy, according to the Grant County Public Utility District. Those campuses house 31 data centers, according to datacentermap.com.
According to streamdatacenters.com, Washington offers a sales and use tax exemption for qualifying data centers on server equipment, power infrastructure and related installation services. There is no property tax abatement offered in Washington. The website notes that Montana offers a property tax reduction for some large data centers. To qualify, a facility must have at least 25,000 square feet and invest $50 million in land, improvements and equipment within 48 months. The incentive lowers the taxable value to 0.9 percent initially, then it gradually increases over 10 years.
Other community benefits
Sue Kane, chief executive officer of NCW Tech Alliance in nearby Wenatchee, Washington, said the changes in the communities with data centers are clear. In 2005, Quincy and the surrounding areas were largely orchard communities, and they still look the same. However, the impacts of data centers have improved the quality of life for many residents.
“Quincy, Washington, is the wealthiest community per capita in Washington,” Kane said, adding that the benefits go far beyond a healthy tax base.
Twenty years ago, Stetner Electric in Quincy had three employees. It now has more than 200, and peaks at more than 400, because it supports the data center industry, Kane said.
“They broke ground in 2006, but they never stopped construction,” Kane said of the data centers. “It’s been 20 years, (Microsoft) just keeps rebuilding that site.”
Kane said the NCW Tech Alliance was founded in 1999 to advocate for technology infrastructure that was needed to support regional economic development.
“They were not wrong,” Kane said, noting that the data centers brought their own connectivity, but having conduit in place was an enticement.
In addition to bringing tax dollars, the data centers near Quincy have proven to be invested in the community, Bergman and Kane said.
This year, to celebrate 20 years in town, Microsoft made 20 $10,000 donations to community organizations in Quincy. Ryan Beebout, vice president of Sabey Data Centers – West, said Sabey donated $1 million to the Wenatchee YMCA for a new building, and paid to upgrade Quincy High School’s sound system in its performing arts center.
“It was a much-needed new facility,” Beebout said of the YMCA.
Another area school wanted Yondr pouches, at a cost of about $30 each, to guarantee a cellphone-free environment. The pouches allow a user to keep their phone on them in a locked fabric pouch that can only be unlocked by a designated unlocking station. Sabey bought enough pouches for all of the students, to facilitate a better learning environment. Sabey also provided Chromebook computers to two schools during the pandemic to facilitate at-home learning.
Beebout said Sabey also sponsors robotics teams from various schools, and has paid to send teams to national competitions.
Additionally, Sabey donated $30,000 each to two different low-income assistance programs through Grant County Public Utility District, to help people struggling with their electric bills.
Kane said it’s not just the companies that donate. She said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, wrote a personal check to the local high school booster club, for example.
Indirect benefits
Kane said that the presence of the data centers, along with the data center technician program at Quincy High School, helps ensure that the area’s high school graduates can stay and make a good living in Quincy. She said that before data centers, those who wanted to work in something other than agriculture or a few trades had to leave the area.
Now there’s a plethora of trade and other professional jobs at data centers that allow families to stay. She noted that students can graduate from the data center certificate program at the high school and make $60,000 a year starting — often more than their parents.
Beebout said that among Sabey’s 250 local employees are HVAC technicians, and electrical, building and security jobs, many of which don’t require a college degree.
“We actually hire straight out of high school,” Beebout said. “It’s easy to hire local. Kids can get a great career locally.”
Cutting-edge education
The campus of Quincy High School differs from those in comparably sized Montana towns. A large, new barn, sprawling farmland owned by the school, a turf-field football stadium and a large school building with multiple wings dwarf those typically found in a town this size.
The school embraces the town’s agricultural roots and prepares students for a technological future, while offering programs for anything in between. Students can raise farm animals, earn their CNA certificate, build a computer, take a fire-science class or become an EMT while earning their diploma, among other options.
“When we built the high school, we did it with the vision of we are building it for programs we didn’t know exist yet,” Superintendent Bergman said. “Our students not only leave with knowledge, but with hands-on experience.”
Bergman, school officials, teachers and students all said that because of the property tax structure, and the generosity of the data center companies, the school and students benefit in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
On this day Gerardo Guerrero, 17, sat in a side room off of the school’s modern computer lab, laptop open, waiting for a one-on-one session with a Microsoft employee who meets with students virtually every day for an AP Computer Science Course.
Guerrero is a student with a bright future, he takes Technology Product Management and this AP course. Each quarter he must pitch and complete a project. This past school year he built a Dungeons and Dragons character creator website from scratch, hand writing close to 3,000 lines of code in 45 days, and is designing his own game.
“It’s a really fun opportunity,” he said.
The extra work has paid off, Guerrero was recognized as the NCW Tech Alliance Tech Leader of the Year, and spent this summer at Harvard University to take an advanced college-level data structure course and a public-speaking course.
As he works, Guerrero said the laptop he designs on, as well as other school resources, including teachers and access to the Microsoft employee, have made these opportunities possible.
“This has always been like my dream,” he said.
“The computer science program is not possible without data centers,” Bergman said. “It’s as good as any college space.”
And it’s not just technology, shop teacher Nick Heuker said data centers allow kids to visit construction sites and support the district in many ways.
“The support here is crazy,” Heuker said. “You are standing in a shop I would dream of as an industry professional.”
“We have a qualified awesome staff,” said Felicie Becker, high school principal, noting that several high-level instructors have come either due to spouses working at the data centers or because of the resources available at the school. “A school like this attracts talent. To have beautiful classrooms is an amazing recruiting tool.”