Thursday, October 1, 2026
WENATCHEE VALLEY — To understand why data centers have become one of North Central Washington’s most consequential, and most misunderstood, industries, it helps to start with a simple reframing: these facilities are not just warehouses for servers. They are export infrastructure.
Instead of shipping apples, aluminum, or processed foods, the region is now exporting something less visible but no less real. We produce computing power, data storage, artificial intelligence workloads, and digital services that are consumed all over the world. The trucks never leave the loading dock, but the value does.
“At its core, a data center exports digital services,” said Stacie De Mestre, CEO of the Chelan-Douglas Regional Port Authority, in a recent interview. “These facilities convert local assets — reliable power, land, fiber, and infrastructure — into globally traded services. In that sense, they function much like aluminum smelters or food processors historically did here.”
From the Port’s perspective, data centers now sit alongside agriculture, food processing, and tourism as part of a diversified export portfolio. They do not replace those sectors, De Mestre said, but complement them by bringing in large amounts of private capital, stabilizing infrastructure investment, and generating long-term tax and utility revenue.
That portfolio view is the regional strategy. On the ground, operators like Malachi Salcido describe the same phenomenon in more practical terms.
“We’re exporting processing,” said Salcido, whose company operates data centers across Chelan, Douglas, and Grant counties. “And at the same time, we’re importing wealth. The dollars come from outside the region, we spend them here, and a lot of what’s left gets reinvested here.”
In economic terms, that distinction matters. Money circulating inside a local economy is one thing. Money coming in from outside and being spent locally is another. Data centers, Salcido argues, do the latter at scale.
And they do it with surprisingly little strain on local services.
A modern data center may employ relatively few people on-site compared to a factory or a food processor, but that headline number misses most of the picture. The Port points to Microsoft’s regional operations as an example. By the end of 2026, the company expects to employ roughly 670 full-time operations staff across Chelan, Douglas, and Grant counties, in jobs paying about 1.7 times the regional average. Microsoft also estimates that each of those jobs supports two more elsewhere in the economy.
Beyond that are the construction cycles, the long-term tax base, the utility revenue, and the infrastructure investments that often accompany these projects.
“When we evaluate these projects, the question isn’t just how many people work onsite every day,” De Mestre said. “It’s whether the project strengthens the region’s long-term economic capacity.”
If data centers are an export industry, North Central Washington is unusually well positioned to host them.
From an operator’s standpoint, Salcido said, the region consistently ranks among the most attractive locations in North America for large-scale computing infrastructure. The reasons are technical, not aesthetic. Central Washington has abundant and reliable power, a cool climate that improves efficiency, strong fiber connectivity, low natural disaster risk, and long-term regulatory predictability.
“This region is one of the four corners of U.S. data infrastructure,” he said, describing a rough geographic balance between the Pacific Northwest, California, Texas, and Virginia. “If you want to move massive amounts of data without too much delay, you need ‘compute’ in all of those places.”
Two deeper, and older, advantages underpin that position.
The first is electricity. Chelan, Douglas, and Grant counties not only consume power, they generate and export it — largely from hydroelectric resources that were built decades before anyone could have imagined AI or cloud computing. That speculative overbuilding of power capacity, Salcido argues, turned out to be profoundly foresighted.
The second is fiber. International “dark fiber” backbone routes, essentially the digital equivalent of interstate highways, pass directly through the region. For physical goods, being far from an interstate is a disadvantage. For digital goods, North Central Washington is right on the mainline.
“These two things together — power at scale and fiber at scale — are incredibly rare,” Salcido said. “And we have both.”
The Port’s role, De Mestre said, is to make sure those advantages are matched with the right kind of enabling infrastructure. In Malaga, for example, the Port assembled land, secured rezoning, helped finance water system upgrades, and developed industrial wastewater facilities to support the Microsoft campus there. The newly formed Malaga Tax Increment Area is intended to extend that kind of groundwork to future projects.
The rapid growth of data centers is often described as a “supercycle,” driven largely by artificial intelligence and the explosive demand for computing power. Some investors naturally ask whether that kind of growth is a bubble.
Salcido’s answer is blunt. The applications may change, but the infrastructure is not going away.
“Compute is only going one direction, and that’s up,” he said. “Even if some companies fail, the need for powered, connected space to put servers in is not going to disappear. That’s physics, not marketing.”
In fact, he argues, the constraint is not demand but infrastructure. Power, transmission, cooling, and water systems take years to plan and build. In one example he cited, a major power application for a new facility took seven years to move from submission to approval.
That long lead time is one reason both operators and public agencies are cautious about pace.
“It’s good that this isn’t fast-tracked,” Salcido said. “If you rush, you skip steps. Around here, development is methodical. It should be.”
De Mestre echoed that sentiment, describing the Port’s role as long-term stewardship rather than simple recruitment. Site suitability, efficient use of power and water, fiscal impact, and the track record of the operator all factor into whether a project is seen as a good regional fit.
One of the more interesting side effects of building out data center infrastructure is what follows it.
As large computing campuses come online, Salcido said, they begin to attract adjacent industries — including research, testing, and advanced manufacturing — that want to be physically close to the compute they rely on. He points to growing interest in robotics, aerospace, and dual-use civilian and military applications that could eventually locate testing and development work in the region.
“You start to get a clustering effect,” he said. “First the compute, then the applications, then the people who want to build and test things next to the compute.”
There is also growing interest in industrial symbiosis — finding ways for data centers and other energy-intensive facilities to share heat, water, or infrastructure with neighboring uses. Salcido said his company has already participated in heat-reuse projects and sees more opportunities ahead, particularly as campuses grow larger and more permanent.
From the Port’s perspective, that kind of integration is part of the long game.
“We’re trying to build a balanced, resilient economy,” De Mestre said. “One that honors our public power roots, supports innovation, and invests in infrastructure that can serve multiple generations of industry.”
In the end, the strangest thing about data centers may be how little they look like an export industry at all.
There are no rail cars. No shipping manifests. No harvest seasons. The product leaves at the speed of light.
But the economic pattern is familiar to this region: take a local advantage, turn it into something the rest of the world needs, and send it out.
Only now, instead of boxes, bins, or ingots, what North Central Washington is shipping is computation.
Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media
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