Oracle Eyes Utah for $260M Data Center

The State of Utah has offered up to $15 million in tax incentives to Oracle Corp. (ORCL) to try and seal the deal for a $260 million data center project. The database software giant has been considering a location in West Jordan, Utah don't have 100 full-time employees.

Last month, it appeared that Oracle was about to buy property in Meridian, Idaho for the huge data center project. The deal fell apart at the last minute, with local media reporting that a property owner had raised their price in the late stages of negotiations. At the time, Oracle was said to have shifted its site location efforts to the Salt Lake City area. West Jordan is a suburb of Salt Lake City.

"This is the exact kind of company we've been trying to recruit for the state of Utah," said Jason Perry, executive director of the Governor's Office of Economic Development. "This company has products in every sector we're trying to recruit. These are high-paying jobs in an industry that's going to be staying in the state of Utah and expanding in the state of Utah. We're quite thrilled that they're looking to expand their presence here."

Oracle has a Tier IV data center in Austin with 42,000 square feet of raised floor space, backed five 2-megawatt generators, storage of 80,000 gallons of diesel fuel and 50,000 gallons of water.

If Oracle locates in Salt Lake City, it would continue the recent progress in Utah, where ViaWest, Center 7 and EMC (Mozy) have all bought or built data centers in the past year.