In March, the Oregon Legislature passed one of the Governor’s permitting reform bills, (HB 4084), which included a last-minute provision to pause the massive tax giveaways that Oregon offers data centers to allow the state more time to truly understand their impacts. However, the moratorium doesn’t go into effect until June, and it only impacts new data centers permitted in urban areas — it didn’t include the majority of proposed data center expansions in rural areas, which are poised to take up an additional 9,100 acres of rural lands across Oregon.
So what’s happened in response? Data center companies are doubling down on their urban permit applications to get them in before the tax moratorium goes into effect next month, with the City of Hillsboro being the main target.
But with so many new applications rolling in, it’s no surprise that Hillsboro is trying to rewrite the public narrative around data centers, stating on its FAQ page that these data centers are needed, bring good jobs to the community, and won’t raise your utility bills. But what’s really going on?
Oregon has one of the largest concentrations of data centers in the country, with Hillsboro being a prime target for continued development. Here’s an alternative FAQ for these concerning realities, to pick up what Hillsboro left out:
Who says that we do? The size and scale of the data centers being built today are not only unsustainable, but likely unnecessary long-term. Amazon recently purchased nearly 1,300 acres in Boardman to build an exascale data center, but what will happen to these massive facilities when they are no longer needed? Tech experts warn that data storage technology is expected to shrink significantly over the coming decade. Early computers used to take up more than a thousand square feet of space, but now they fit onto our watches. The computing machines that store our data are expected to follow this same trend–leaving massive industrial ghost towns in their wake that we’ll be left to reckon with.
Do we need to store data in our modern world? Yes. Do we need data centers at the quantity and scale that they are being built today? In the long-term, most likely, we don’t.
Largely not. Thanks to the Enterprise Zone tax breaks (the ones about to be on pause for urban data centers), Hillsboro data centers are wiggling their way out of $85 million in property taxes owed for 2026. Across the state, those property tax giveaways total more than $450 million in lost revenue.
These tax breaks are advertised as temporary, but in reality, their applications get renewed when their initial time is up, as long as the data centers expand their facilities or install new equipment. In fact, Hillsboro is now stacking tax break renewals to data centers for up to 25 years. And these giveaways have massive impacts across government services, including our education system.
Data centers also contribute very little income tax revenue, as the jobs they create are few and far between, and have to pay no sales tax in Oregon.
Hillsboro mentions other fees that data centers pay for, like the school support fee, but fails to address the realities of these numbers. Data centers give school districts less than half of what they would normally have to give thanks to their generous tax credits, and only in the last two years of the five-year exemption period.
Hillsboro also mentions that data centers pay community service fees, but what little fees are collected the City can use however it chooses. It does not need to go to schools, the county or any other jurisdiction, nor does it have to pay for the infrastructure costs associated with the data center’s development.
The math says no, especially when you take out construction jobs, indirect jobs and induced jobs from the equation. When it comes to permanent, direct jobs created, data centers are known for producing extremely low jobs per acre at an extremely high cost. Hillsboro reports that data centers take up about 429 acres of land, but of the 11 major data center operators in Washington County receiving property tax breaks, only 284 jobs were reported for the 2025-26 tax year. With so few jobs and such high tax breaks, each one of these jobs costs the state on average nearly $300,000.
There are also very few sideboards to guarantee that these jobs are high quality. To qualify for these property tax breaks, the jobs created only need to be 102% to 125% of minimum wage. We are giving away millions of dollars in exchange for very little economic benefit.
In addition, the types of AI manufacturing that many data centers support could be counterproductive to our country’s job growth overall, with many companies citing AI efficiency as a major reason for recent layoffs.
They already are. Energy forecasters report that 80% of the Pacific Northwest’s energy growth this decade will come from data centers. Companies like PGE have already spent around $210 million in Washington County for just the transmission upgrades needed for data centers, not to mention the substations and energy production itself. These costs are and will continue to be shared across ratepayers for the foreseeable future. To pay for these upgrades, PGE has increased rates by over 50% in just the past five years, with another 5% increase recently approved for the average residential customer.
Washington County has a $1.6 billion pipeline project that will increase your water rates one way or another, but even more concerning than water rates is water quality and consumption, which the City of Hillsboro fails to address. Increases in wastewater pollution and volume burden Clean Water Services systems and may lead to increased municipal sewer rates among other harms.
Smaller data centers can consume 300,000 to 500,000 gallons of water per day, but the largest hyperscale data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day to accommodate the cooling technology needed to ensure that these data centers don’t implode from the inside out.
There are also growing concerns around water pollution from data centers from things like corrosion inhibitors or biocides, which are returned into the wastewater management system in urban areas, or dumped directly onto our rural lands. These pollutants threaten our watersheds and soils, put our agriculture industry and wetlands at risk, and pose massive public safety concerns. In areas where the drinking water is already polluted with contaminants such as nitrates, data center evaporative cooling processes concentrate these contaminants in the water moving through their systems. The water leaving these sites then has much higher concentrations of the contaminant when it enters the municipal wastewater system.
In the Tualatin River sub basin, thermal pollution is a major concern. High stream and river temperatures impair water quality and threaten wildlife species, such as salmon. In the 1990s, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) added temperature to the list of water quality impairments for the sub basin, and in 2001, it issued a pollution load limit, known as a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) under its federal Clean Water Act jurisdiction. Over the last 30 years, Clean Water Services has made important progress in lowering the temperature of water in our sub basin through improved wastewater treatment processes and repairing riparian corridors along the Tualatin River and its tributaries. However, the cooling water discharged from data centers can raise receiving water (wastewater) temperatures by 5–15°F. With at least 30 data centers in Hillsboro discharging water into the wastewater system that likely contains thermal pollution, Clean Water Services’ progress is at risk of being undermined.
Yes, the Tualatin watershed’s incredible density of data centers not only impacts our water through consumption and pollution, but harms our watershed in several other important ways.
In the Tualatin watershed, building data centers often requires the filling of wetlands and destruction of riparian areas that play an important role in the watershed's water cycle and flood resilience. The massive industrial structures turn acres of valuable farmland and wetlands into acres of impervious concrete surfaces that create challenges with groundwater reabsorption, precipitation runoff, erosion along surrounding waterways, and flood resilience.
The new road infrastructure needed to support these industrial sites contributes to increased amounts of contaminants like oil and 6PPD-q in runoff, and ultimately in our tributaries and river. 6PPD-q is essentially tire dust and it has been found to be acutely toxic to threatened coho salmon, which run through many waterways in the Tualatin watershed.
Although permitting agencies review each development project for its individual impact on surrounding natural resources, there is currently no state or federal agency tasked with analyzing the cumulative impacts of having so many data centers in one relatively small area.
Permanently destroying our water systems and watersheds, in addition to paving over world class farmlands and soils, in pursuit of what will ultimately be a temporary industry or industry need is not a balanced nor wise approach. We will always need water and we will always need to grow food to survive, but we are destroying these vital resources for a temporary need.
