Rowan Green Data is planning a data center in Morrow County, Oregon.
First reported by the East Oregonian, the County planning commission late last month recommended approval of plans for the Percheron Data Center outside Boardman. The proposal will be sent before the County Board of Commissioners later this month.
The company is requesting to rezone around 274 acres approximately nine miles south of I-84 on Tower Road from Exclusive Farm (EFU) use to General Industrial (MG) and adopt a Limited Use Overlay Zone to limit MG uses to a data center only.
Rowan is aiming to develop a 1.125 million sq ft (104,515 sqm) data center complex totaling four buildings. Construction is slated to begin in 2024, pending site approvals.
The property is located roughly 11 miles southwest of Boardman, just north of the Carty Reservoir and the Carty Generating Station; a 450MW combined-cycle natural gas-fuelled electric generating power plant that will in the future include a 50MW solar farm.
The campus borders sites owned by Portland General Electric and the US Navy. It was previously owned by Threemile Canyon Farms. Rowan has set up a dedicated site to the Percheron project, saying Threemile Canyon Farm found the soil unproductive and didn’t grow anything there.
“This site was deliberately chosen for our data center project because it has never and will never be used for farming, due to extremely poor soil quality and lack of irrigation. According to Threemile Canyon Farms, the site has been vacant since at least 1952, and agriculture is not a viable option here,” Rowan said.
According to the Percheron site, there is currently no end-user under contract with Rowan.
“We’re still working on finding a customer,” Bobby Hollis, Rowan’s chief commercial officer said during the commission meeting. “The kind of customers that align with our vision are the big tech customers you’ve heard of before. The types of companies we work with are the Microsofts, Amazons, Metas, and Apples — companies that are as sustainable as we are.”
Amazon has a major presence around Morrow and neighboring Umatilla Counties, while Prineville and Hillsboro further west are home to a number of hyperscale companies and data center operators including QTS, NTT, Aligned, Stack, Flexential, Apple, and Meta. Google is also present in Oregon's Wasco County.
Rowan was set up in 2021 as a Joint Venture between Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners and Birch Infrastructure to develop hyperscale data centers. Quinbrook, an ESG-focused investment manager, has since taken over complete ownership of the company.
So far Rowan has been developing a 500MW campus in Temple, Texas.
According to Rowan’s website, this will be the third data center project the company has in Oregon. Project Schwab is located around Prineville, while Project Merriwether is in Forest Grove near Hillsboro.
Outside of Oregon and Temple, the company lists one site in California (Project Matterhorn) and another in Austin, Texas (Project Brown), with plans for further projects in Texas, Maryland, Virginia, Arizona, and Utah.
The company has previously listed two sites totaling 45MW in Oregon under the name Project Hood; a 500MW facility in San Francisco under the name Project Hannold; another 50MW facility in San Francisco under the name Project Anker; and four sites in Texas totaling 1.2GW of capacity under the name Project Longhorn, though none are now on the company's website.
