Yahoo Nebraska Data Center Set for La Vista

Yahoo has selected La Vista, a suburb of Omaha, as the location for its Nebraska data center project, according to papers filed with the state. Nebraska Tax Commissioner Doug Ewald told Omaha.com that Yahoo has applied for tax incentives under the Nebraska Super Advantage program, which requires a minimum investment of $100 million and the creation of at least 50 high-salary jobs paying a minimum average salary of $68,700.

La Vista is one of the fastest-growing cities in Nebraska, and has 800 acres of industrial business parks. Current corporate residents from the tech sector include HP and eBay's Paypal unit, which employs about 2,000 workers at a call center in La Vista.  

The Nebraska project is part of a broader data center expansion by Yahoo, which in recent months has leased space in Santa Clara and accelerated  deployment of its footprint in Ashburn, Va. as it continues to scale its Internet infrastructure to compete with Google and Microsoft. Yahoo is also moving ahead with plans for a data center in Switzerland and is building an international cloud computing platform with HP and Intel.

Omaha has been highlighted as one of the most affordable U.S. locations to operate a data center by The Boyd Company, with an annual operating expense of $12.9 million, less than half the cost of operating a similar facility in New York. Nebraska has also been developing incentive programs to compete with its neighbor Iowa, which has won more than $1 billion in data center investment from Google and Microsoft.

Google is building a $600 million data center in Council Bluffs, while Microsoft is in the late stages of site selection for a project near Des Moines.