Online auction site eBay has chosen a suburb of Salt Lake City as the site for a $334 million data center project. The company said yesterday that it has purchased land in South Jordan, Utah in the Daybreak Commerce Park, not far from whereOracle Corp. (ORCL) is building a huge data center.

The state Office of Economic Development offered eBay $27.3 million in tax incentives over 10 years to build the facility in Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The data center is expected to create about 50 jobs with wages averaging $49,200 a year, about 50 percent above the Salt Lake County annual median wage.

The facility, which could be as large as 250,000 square feet, would continue a regional expansion that has seen eBay acquire a large data center in Phoenix and expand its facility in Denver.

Utah is not known for housing huge data centers, but has become home to a growing number of web hosts and enterprise data centers, including facilities for Center 7, ViaWest, WestHost and TierFour (UVNet) are among the companies that have built or acquired data centers in Utah in the past several years.   The company cited the location’s low exposure to natural disasters as an important factor in its selection of the 135,000 square foot building.

A 2007 study by the Kauffman Foundation found that Utah led the nation in “economic dynamism” based on a strong concentration of fast-growing technology startups.

What region do you feel is the new Silicon Valley?

Tags: Business and Economy, Kauffman Foundation, Real Estate, Salt Lake City Utah, Salt Lake Tribune, United States, Utah, WestHost

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 10:32 am and is filed under Datacenter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.