Why Central Washington became a data center market
Central Washington is the stretch of the state east of the Cascades along the Columbia River, and for this guide it means three counties: Grant, which contains Quincy and Moses Lake, Douglas, which contains East Wenatchee, and Chelan, which contains Malaga. The buildings are clustered in and around Quincy.
The reason is power. The Columbia River hydroelectric system sits next to these towns, and for twenty years it has been some of the cheapest firm electricity in the United States. The climate is dry and cool for much of the year, which shortens the mechanical cooling season. Land was farmland, so it was flat, serviced and available in quantity. Microsoft built here in the mid 2000s and the cluster grew around that decision.
What did not arrive with the buildings is a metropolitan economy. Quincy is a small agricultural town. There is no local enterprise demand of the sort that built Seattle's colocation market on the other side of the mountains, and there is no large pool of data center labour. That shapes what this market can sell you, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before you shortlist it. Seattle and Puget Sound is a different market with a different answer and it has its own guide on this site.
The power picture, and why it is now the constraint
The thing that made this corridor attractive is also what now limits it. Cheap hydro drew enough load that connecting more of it is no longer routine, and the utility infrastructure into Quincy is being expanded on a timescale measured in years rather than quarters.
One episode from this summer shows what that means in practice. A behind-the-meter gas generation project, fourteen generators on land owned by the Grant County Public Utility District, was proposed to serve the Vantage campus at Quincy. The utility approved it. In July 2026, after more than five hundred public comments were filed in opposition, the developer withdrew its air permit application. Read it as a signal about the market rather than about one company: an operator here looked at grid service, decided it needed its own generation, and then found that building generation carries a public process of its own.
For a tenant the practical consequence is narrow and important. In this corridor, ask about power before you ask about space. A hall with floor area and no energised capacity behind it is not deliverable, and the date on which power arrives is the date your project actually starts.
Ask what is energised in the building today, and ask it before anything else. Then ask where the next increment of power comes from and when it is contracted to arrive. In most markets that is a second-round question. Here it is the first one, because floor area is the plentiful thing and power is the scarce one. If the answer is that capacity is coming, ask who is supplying it, what stage its own permitting is at, and what your remedy is if the date moves.
Three do. The permit layer is here through the Washington SEPA register, the statewide environmental review index, which is the layer that names the operator. The interconnection layer is here from PeeringDB, and every row links to the building's own public entry. The announced layer is here and is collected by hand, and in this market it carries no row, for reasons set out below. The fourth is not: our verified facility inventory does not extend to Washington, so there is no building count on this page rather than a zero pretending to be one. Note also what the SEPA layer cannot do. It is a register of environmental determinations, not a building permit file, and it publishes the determination rather than the date it was filed, so this page can tell you how much is in the record and not how much of it is recent.
What has been announced in Central Washington
No operator has published a megawatt figure for a new data center in this corridor that we are willing to print, so this page carries no announced row. Two figures fill that gap in search results and neither means what it appears to. The gigawatt figure attached to Vantage is a national power generation partnership between Vantage and VoltaGrid covering that company's United States portfolio, not capacity announced for Central Washington. And the generation project that partnership would have built here, fourteen gas generators in Quincy on land owned by the Grant County Public Utility District, was approved by the utility and then withdrawn by VoltaGrid in July 2026 after more than five hundred public comments were filed against it. What is left is the permit record below, where the largest capacity anyone has stated sits on a Microsoft filing at Malaga. That is a figure in a filing, not an offer, and none of it is leasable colocation. Read the reporting.
Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.
Who is actually plugged in across Central Washington
A building existing and a building being connected are different facts, and only one of them decides whether your traffic can get where it needs to go cheaply. These figures come from PeeringDB, which the network operators themselves maintain, so every row below links to the building's own public entry.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Buildings listed | 4 | Registered in PeeringDB across Central Washington, by 3 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 3 | 1 carries no network presence, which usually means single tenant or simply unregistered |
| Network presences | 9 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 1 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 2 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 44% | Intergate.Quincy holds 4 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | Intergate.Quincy | Sabey Data Centers | 1 | 1 |
| 3 | H5 Data Centers Quincy | H5 Data Centers | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | Serverfarm TiTAN Moses Lake | Serverfarm | 0 | 0 |
From PeeringDB, which is maintained by the network operators present in these buildings rather than by the landlords, which is what makes it worth more than a directory. Two limits. Entries are voluntary, so a building showing no networks may be single tenant or may simply never have registered. And a network being present says nothing about whether the building has space, power or a price for you: that is still a call.
What the public construction record shows, and who is in it
The source below is the Washington SEPA register, which covers the whole state. That is worth stating plainly, because this page is about one corridor and the count is not. The corridor is where the operators we can name are: nearly every filing that carries Microsoft, Sabey, Vantage or CyrusOne names Quincy, Malaga or East Wenatchee, and the rest of the record is spread thinly across the state, including zoning amendments and a cryptocurrency facility that have nothing to do with colocation. Treat the total as the size of the file we hold, and the named operators as the part that describes this market.
Three filings state a capacity, and they are not comparable to each other. The largest is a Microsoft campus at Malaga, where the figure comes from the filing text itself. The other two are generator nameplate ratings summed from the equipment listed, which is a measure of standby plant and not of computing load. The table marks which is which, and the difference matters if you are quoting any of it.
Washington SEPA determinations, filed statewide and concentrated in the Quincy corridor. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Filings we track | 55 | Deduplicated. Across 2 sources, no dated record to no dated record |
| Tenant fit-out filings | 3 | A customer is landing in a named building. The strongest signal in the set |
| New building filings | 2 | Shell and site work, which is capacity two years out, not now |
| Distinct addresses | 33 | Separate sites in the record, not separate buildings |
| Largest capacity in the record | 360 MW | Stated on 3 of 55 filings. Capacity is rarely published, so this is a floor, not a market total |
| Largest floor area filed | 950,000 SF | One permit, not a campus total. Floor area is published far more often than capacity |
| Operators we can name | 4 | 24 of 55 filings name a recognizable operator. The rest name an engineer, a builder or a holding company |
| Filings with no date published | 55 | The source publishes the facility, not the filing date |
Operators appearing by name: Microsoft (13), Sabey (7), Vantage Data Centers (3), CyrusOne (1).
The filings that state a capacity
Most permits never mention megawatts. These do, and the basis matters: a figure the applicant stated for the project is a different claim from a generator nameplate, which is backup plant rather than sellable load.
| Capacity | Basis | The filing |
|---|---|---|
| 360 MW | Capacity stated in the filing | EAT12-13-14 Data Center Campus Microsoft |
| 5.7 MW | Generator nameplate, summed from stated ratings | SEPA determination: MDNS |
| 3.7 MW | Generator nameplate, summed from stated ratings | Integrate Columbia II |
Collected from Washington SEPA Register (Department of Ecology) and EPA ECHO air facility records for Washington. A permit proves that construction is happening. It does not prove that space is available, and no public filing anywhere discloses what is contractible at a named building. That answer comes from an operator call, which is the part we do by hand. See how we verify capacity.
Where the activity is, and what it means for a buyer
Quincy
The centre of the corridor and where every publicly interconnected building in this market except one sits. It holds the multi-tenant operators, which makes it the only part of Central Washington where an ordinary colocation conversation is likely to start. It is also where the power constraint is most acute, so treat availability as a question about a specific building rather than about the town.
Moses Lake
Twenty five miles from Quincy, in the same county, with one building on the public interconnection record. It shows up in the same permit file and the same utility service territory. Worth testing if Quincy comes back full, and worth confirming what network reaches it, because the interconnection record here is one entry deep.
Malaga and East Wenatchee
The Chelan and Douglas county side of the corridor, about forty miles north west of Quincy. This is where the largest capacity figure in our permit record sits, on a Microsoft campus. No building here carries a PeeringDB entry, so if your requirement is network led there is nothing on the public record to test yet.
Seattle, across the mountains
Not this market, counted nowhere on this page, and for a large share of requirements that begin with an interest in Washington it is the market that will actually answer them. Two and a half hours away by road, with the carrier density, the staff and the multi-tenant supply this corridor does not have.
When Central Washington is right, and when it is the wrong choice
It is right when power economics dominate your decision and you can wait for capacity. If your load is large, your workload tolerates distance from your people, and the difference between this corridor's power cost and a coastal market's is worth real money at your scale, then the case is strong and twenty years of hyperscale investment is evidence that it holds.
It is the wrong choice when you need to be in a building this quarter. The multi-tenant supply is thin, the publicly registered interconnection is four buildings, and the constraint on adding capacity is real enough that an operator here recently pursued its own generation and did not get it built. A requirement measured in a few cabinets, or one that needs staff on site regularly, will be better served in Seattle, and the comparison is not close.
It is also the wrong choice if you are buying on the strength of what is announced, because in this market nothing is. The figures that circulate belong to a national generation partnership and to a project that was withdrawn. What we can show you instead is the filing record below, which is smaller, duller and checkable.
Open with power and get the answer in writing: what is energised in this building now, what is contracted next, and on what date. Ask whether the supply is utility service or the operator's own generation, and if it is the latter, ask what stage its permitting has reached. Ask about remote hands explicitly, including response times and after-hours cover, because the labour pool here is small and it is cheaper to find that out now than during your first incident. Ask which networks are in the building rather than in the market, since four buildings carry a public entry and the density is not evenly spread across them. And do not accept a gigawatt figure in a proposal without asking whether it describes computing capacity, a power plant, or a partnership signed somewhere else.