Quincy's Microsoft data center boom prompts new school, library, hospital, police station

Once upon a time, Quincy’s biggest exports were the crops of Central Washington, whether it be sweet corn, apples, or potatoes grown in the Columbia Basin.

Now, computing power is driving the market and the infrastructure of the town of just over 9,000 people.

Two decades after Microsoft broke ground on its Quincy data center campus, the city’s transformation is visible in nearly every direction. There is a new high school, hospital, police station, fire station, library, public works buildings, and aquatic center. An indoor youth recreation facility is next.

The projects were paid for through voter-approved bonds and local public. But Quincy leaders say the data centers dramatically expanded the assessed value and job base that made those projects financially possible.

“When I was growing up, it was about a third of the size it is today,” said Nick Konen, a Quincy native who now helps run Microsoft’s local campus. “We just had one stoplight. We were pretty much known for farming.”

Today, Quincy has two stoplights and a roundabout. Census figures show its population has grown nearly 27% over 15 years.

Konen said the old downtown once looked “like circa 1976” and needed a facelift. He left Quincy after college because the local choices seemed limited to agriculture, food processing, the school district, or public agencies. The data center boom, he said, created a reason to return.

On a recent summer day, he proudly led an exclusive tour of the site for KOMO TV, peeling back the curtain over the campus for the very first time.

Microsoft and Yahoo were among the first companies to break ground on Central Washington data centers in 2006, drawn by abundant hydropower, available land and lower electricity costs. The region’s cheap Columbia River power was a major draw for the industry.

For longtime Quincy electrical contractor Mike Stetner, the effect has been immediate and personal. His company grew from three employees to about 220, with a specialized mission-critical team working on data center and telecommunications projects.

“Everything’s just gotten bigger, better, faster,” Stetner said. “We got new schools, new fire station, new police station, city hall. You name it, we’ve replaced it, rebuilt it, done it again.”

At Quincy High School, Superintendent Dr. Nik Bergman said the data-center-driven tax base changed the math for a $108 million bond voters approved in 2016. The project led to the new high school, elementary school renovations, additional gyms, and a districtwide grade-level reconfiguration.

Bergman said data centers account for about 54% of the district’s local tax base. As assessed values rose, the tax rate connected to the bond fell from about $1.96 per $1,000 of assessed value to less than 90 cents.

Asked whether Quincy could have sought voter approval for a new high school before the data centers arrived, Bergman was blunt.

“No, absolutely not,” he said. “It would have been way out of pocket, too much money for our taxpayers to handle that burden.”

The new school, which opened in 2019, includes a 550-seat performing arts center, dedicated drama space and career and technical education programs. Bergman said band and choir participation has grown to more than 100 students, while drama productions now involve more than 50 students. The school also added a certified nursing assistant program, allowing students to learn in Quincy and complete internships at Quincy Valley Medical Center.

That hospital is perhaps the clearest measure of how the community’s fortunes have changed.

Glenda Bishop moved to Quincy in 1984 and joined the hospital in 1994. As CEO of Quincy Valley Medical Center, she has helped lead the replacement of a patched-together, leaky 1959 facility with a new hospital that opened in May 2025. The $55 million project won 64% voter support in 2022. Bishop said higher assessed values allowed the hospital district to reduce both the rate and the repayment period voters were asked to accept. What began as a proposed 30-year bond at 48 cents per $1,000 of assessed value was ultimately issued over 22 years; this year’s rate is 34 cents per $1,000.

“Our administrative team is absolutely 100% confident that if we had not had an assessed value that is enhanced by the technology population in Quincy, by the data centers, we could not have done this,” Bishop said.

The eight-bed critical-access hospital now includes a 24/7 Level 4 trauma emergency room, therapy services, a therapy pool, a rural health clinic, wound care, and imaging services that patients previously had to access in a far more fragmented setting. Hospital commissioners have credited Bishop with shepherding the project while improving the hospital’s finances and keeping services running during construction.

Washington began offering data centers sales-tax breaks on eligible computer equipment and installation work in 2010. In 2022, lawmakers passed House Bill 1846, extending the rural tax preference and creating one for qualifying facilities in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

The law tied the incentives to family-wage job requirements, green-building certification and labor standards for new construction. But lawmakers also included a provision to study the industry’s impact on the power grid.

That decision matters because data centers’ local economic benefits are paired with substantial energy demands.

Yet, the Grant County PUD says it has been able to keep consumer energy costs low, at 6.2 cents per kWh. That’s more than half the cost of the statewide average of 13.7 cents, and the nationwide average of 17.6 cents, per the agency

Konen and Stetner said they have not seen dramatic local water or residential rate impacts from the growth. But Quincy’s experience does not necessarily answer the questions facing every community considering a data center, especially regions without access to low-cost hydropower, abundant land or a gradual, two-decade buildout.

Microsoft points to Quincy as an example of how infrastructure can reduce some of those impacts. The company contributed tens of millions of dollars toward the city’s industrial water reuse center, which opened in 2021. The facility treats cooling water for reuse by local industries rather than discharging it, reducing the need for potable well water. Microsoft also says the system has helped cut potable-water use by an average of 97%, with roughly 1.5 million cubic meters of reclaimed water annually available for community use. The company says newly designed data centers also use closed-loop cooling systems, in which the same water circulates repeatedly rather than being used once and lost through evaporation. At Microsoft’s Quincy Circular Center, workers repair equipment, recover usable components from retired hardware and recycle materials to keep them in service longer rather than sending them to a landfill.

For Quincy, the data-center era has meant new technical careers, an expanded tax base and public facilities that residents once considered out of reach. For Washington, it has also become a test of whether economic development incentives, environmental commitments and fast-rising electricity demand can be managed at the same time.

“We’re still a small community, and we’re still an agriculturally rich community,” Bishop said. “But we’re also a community that’s not afraid of the future.”