JPMorgan Eyeing Site in New York State for Data Center Build

JPMorgan Chase is negotiating with a town in New York State to purchase a large property for a bank data center.

The company has offered $7.5 million for the 60-acre property in Orangeburg, which used to be the site of the Rockland Psychiatric Center, city officials told the local news outlet The Journal News.

While data center outsourcing is on the rise, with companies increasingly leasing colocation space and using cloud services instead of building their own data centers, many still find it necessary to keep some of their workloads in-house. This is especially true for bank data centers, which must comply with financial services industry regulations.

Orangeburg is home to another financial-services data center, a server farm built by Bloomberg. There is also a colocation facility in town, operated by 1547 Critical Systems Realty, where one of the tenants is Green House Data.

City officials have been using tax incentives to pursue companies that would build data centers in Orangeburg since Bloomberg decided to build its $710 million facility there in 2014. A lot of power is available from the local utility, and the city is close to the data center clusters in New York City and New Jersey.

Bloomberg made the decision after its older data center in Manhattan came dangerously close to a disastrous outage during the flooding that followed Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Read more: Bloomberg Data Centers: Where the "Go"s Go

The city estimates JPMorgan will spend about $40 million to demolish about 40 existing buildings on the site and clean up hazardous materials, including asbestos and lead.