Another Large Data Center for Oklahoma?

Chickasaw Nation Industries (CNI) is planning to build a 150,000 square foot data center in the Oklahoma Technology Corridor near Norman, according to local media reports. CNI is the economic development arm of the Chickasaw Nation, and says it is planning to build a Tier IV data center on its new corporate headquarters property. Local economic development officials said the facility will be a "hardened bunker" which is expected to be able to withstand an F-4 tornado, an important consideration in Oklahoma.

The new project comes just a week after Google announced plans to builf a $600 million data center in Pryor, Oklahoma. Curiously, CNI is projecting that its data center will create 1,000 jobs paying $70,000 a year. That's substantially more than the 200 full-time jobs and 500 temporary construction jobs expected to be created by the Google project, which is several times larger than the planned CNI facility. Google projects that its full-time workers will make $48,000 a year.

Chickasaw Nation Industries operates an IT services company, CNI Information Technology LLC. The company has "extensive" IT support cintracts with federal agencies originally awardeds to DataCom Sciences, which CNI acquired in 2003. In addition to the federal contracts, CNI is said to be negotiating with the University of Oklahoma to operate a large data center in the facilty.