Yahoo Opens New Nebraska Data Center

lavistasite

Yahoo has purchased this building in La Vista, Nebraska for $14.8 million.

Yahoo (YHOO) has opened its new data center in La Vista Nebraska. The 180,000 square foot facility near Omaha will hold about 100,000 servers, employ around 50 people and will become the largest Yahoo data center when expansions are completed.

Yahoo began the 17-state location process that led them to Nebraska in early 2008.  Similar to other Midwest deals that were negotiated earlier with Google in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Microsoft in West Des Moines, Yahoo selected Nebraska for state tax incentives, low energy costs and a quality workforce.  The announced $100 million deal included the La Vista data center and a customer care center in Omaha, with a combined 200 jobs created.

Half of Space Finished in First Phase
The newly opened facility will power Yahoo's search engine, e-mail service and other products and is running at about half capacity, according to Scott Noteboom, who oversees data center development for Yahoo.  Nebraska Dave Heineman and other state and local officials were at the Thursday event to unveil the new data center.

“Companies like Yahoo like coming to a place like Omaha,” Heineman said. “We have low energy costs and a great workforce, and they're comfortable with the quality of life. I think we're going to see our presence expand in the data center arena.”

More recently Yahoo announced a $150 million, 30 acre Lockport, New York data center, which will use an innovative "computing coop" design.  The decision to build in Lockport followed an extensive site selection process.

Yahoo was also in the news Tuesday as billionaire investor Carl Icahn sold off more than 63 million of his shares, co-founder Jerry Yang put 3 million of his shares on the market and co-founder David Filo plans to sell 2 million shares.