Gov. Chris Gregoire helped celebrate the expansion of Microsoft's data center in Quincy WA at a special June 21 reception hosted by the Port of Quincy. This past legislative session, Gregoire was instrumental in getting legislation passed that provides tax incentives to companies wishing to locate data centers in Washington state's rural counties. House Bill 3147, which allows a 15-month sales tax exemption on the purchase and installation of computers and energy for new data centers in rural counties, and Senate Bill 6789, a companion bill concerning sales and use tax exemptions for certain equipment and infrastructure contained in data centers, were approved by the state Legislature earlier this year. The town of Quincy, Washington has been the biggest beneficiary of the tax incentives for the data center industry. The measure was a key factor in Microsoft's decision to begin construction on a second major data center in Quincy. Construction is expected to create approximately 200 jobs.
Egils Milbergs, executive director of the Washington Economic Development Commission, was in the audience. What follows are his reflections on the larger meaning of this celebration.
"This event celebrates even a larger and exciting innovation ecosystem of which Quincy is a part. What is going on here is not just about data centers. It's a lot more…. intelligence is being integrated into smart power grids, rail lines and roads, logistics and supply chains, health-care systems, agriculture, on-line education, monitoring the environment and managing water supplies. In a few short years all objects will have an IP address. Supporting for these applications is generating huge streams of data, that needs to be fast, secure, reliable, and energy efficient. According to IBM 30% of the data in the world now consists of medical images. In just three years, the world's IP traffic is expected to total more than half a zettabyte. (That's a trillion gigabytes—or a 1 followed by 21 zeroes). And a lot of bandwidth and data storage is going to be required to handle video, music, business analytics, social networking, environmental modeling, games and digital imaging of all kinds. The Twilight phenomenon depends on it, 400 million Facebook users depend on it, 500 million Skype customers depend on it and billions of internet connected screens depend on it.
So this is not just about tax breaks—it's a much bigger thing. Quincy is emerging as the leading port for the digital and knowledge economy. Much of our future prosperity, jobs and exports will result from the fusing of tangible (physical capital) and the intangible (digital and knowledge capital). The real news is that the data center cluster developing here in Quincy will drive astounding advances in industrial productivity, supply chain management, health care, education, entertainment and digital products for export. And in a deeper sense the work here enables a higher level of collective intelligence—a global brain. By connecting people and ideas—we are building the long term foundation of a network driven innovation economy.
Who could have imagined a few short years ago, in a region traditionally based on agriculture, we would see the infrastructure of the knowledge based economy germinate. Let's keep expanding on this dream."
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