Comcast Building Data Center in Oregon’s Tech Hub

Comcast is building a data center in Hillsboro, Oregon, a city within the Portland metro that together with nearby Beaverton has formed the state’s high-tech hub and a busy data center market.

The U.S. telecommunications and media giant did not provide any details about the upcoming facility, saying only that it was being built by Portland’s Fortis Construction.

Intel has huge presence in the area, along with a long list of other well-known names in high-tech, the likes of HP, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, Autodesk, and Apple.

The latest comer to the local data center market is T5 Data Centers, which kicked off construction there in September. NetApp and Telx are leasing data center space from Digital Realty Trust in Hillsboro. ViaWest is another provider serving the market, listing Intel as one of its customers there.

Comcast announced its project along with opening a new store in Hillsboro. The company already employs more than 1,200 customer service reps and technicians in Beaverton.

“We appreciate Comcast opening a new store in Hillsboro which will provide more convenient customer service to our residents,” Hillsboro Mayor Jerry Willey said in a statement. “We welcome all business investments into our city.”

Ethernet On-Ramps to Cloud Launched

Besides residential Internet, phone, and cable businesses, Comcast also serves the enterprise IT market with connectivity solutions. This week, the company announced a new service that provides customers connectivity from colocation data centers to cloud providers via Ethernet .

The company is offering private cloud “on-ramps” through the Equinix Cloud Exchange, selling 10 Gbps, 1 Gbps, and sub-gigabit connections.