2 search engine, will build its new East Coast regional data center on about 30 acres in the Town of Lockport Industrial Park, just west of the Delphi Corp. plant.
Yahoo! will buy the land from the Lockport Industrial Development Agency for $450,000.
Plans call for a two-phase construction project and computer equipment "fit-out," using what Yahoo! executive Dibble called a "brand new design and engineering approach" to create an environmentally friendly, "green" facility, with about 191,000 square feet on one floor. Plans submitted to the town show the facility as a grouping of prefabricated metal pods packed with computer servers and other hardware.
The first phase will create 75 jobs in exchange for 10 megawatts of low-cost hydropower from the New York Power Authority. Construction on that portion of the project, consisting of office and data center space, is expected to begin in August, and the facility should be operational by May 2010.
The second phase, expected to start in spring 2012, would focus on the data center space and would receive 15 megawatts of power, with Yahoo! investing "tens of millions" in additional dollars and creating another 50 jobs.
The jobs will pay between $65,000 and $75,000, plus benefits, and include a variety of engineering and other technical positions, some of which are entry-level, but most of which are skilled, experienced jobs. The jobs include other functions not related to the data center, such as global help desk and highly skilled "network optimization" positions, Dibble said.
The jobs are highly subsidized by the discounted power. For every $65,000 job created, Yahoo! would get $330,000 to $810,000 in power discounts over the life of the subsidy, depending on the market price of the energy and the program's duration, according to Buffalo Niagara Enterprise and Buffalo News calculations. That's $33,000 to $54,000 per job per year.
About 250 short-term construction jobs will also be created, according to the Lockport IDA.
No other state aid will be provided. But the Lockport IDA is giving Yahoo! a 20-year abatement of county and state sales taxes on construction materials and equipment, and a 20-year phased payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) to replace property taxes. The sales tax break saves $12 million. On the PILOT, Yahoo! will pay nothing for the first 10 years, then increase payments by 20 percent every two years until it reaches full value in year 18.
Both the IDA and the town Planning Board unanimously approved the project Tuesday afternoon following separate public hearings.
North Carolina also paid heavily in the form of property tax refunds over 30 years to capture Google's $600 million data center in 2007 for the manufacturing city of Lenoir.
As with Yahoo!, the Google facility yielded just over 100 jobs. The facility is environmentally friendly, doesn't generate significant trash and doesn't require more policing.
