Will data centers be Oregon’s big political issue this fall?

In May, state Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, area lost her bid for reelection to the legislature, the first such incumbent loss since 2018. Multiple reasons contributed to Sollman’s loss to union-backed challenger Myrna Muñoz, but a pivotal and new factor was data centers.

Those massive buildings, consuming vast amounts of electricity and water and producing compute, serving as the physical location of much of the internet cloud and especially the locus of fast-growing artificial intelligence.

The Sollman result also turned on factors including labor union support. But the broad emotional push seemed to come in reaction to the growth of data centers in the Hillsboro area.

Sollman herself said, “They were saying I was going to turn 1,700 acres of rich farmland, and turn them into data centers. It’s a totally unfair characterization of my record.”

On Aug. 2, responding to protests, the Hillsboro City Council set a moratorium lasting four months on additional data centers. The meeting was called abruptly with less than usual notice because, Mayor Beach Pace said, “The idea behind it was to prevent a rush of applications from data centers.”

This has become an explosive issue in Washington County, where somewhere between a dozen and three dozen (depending on how you count) data centers are operating or planned. And Washington County is not only Oregon’s second largest county, it is the political hinge that more than anywhere else took Oregon from a purple to a blue state in the last three decades.

But that’s not nearly all. The fight over data centers in Oregon has popped up in many places, some unexpected.

The website Cleanview counts 93 operating data centers operating in Oregon (hitting above average among the states), and 32 planned. Taken together, those operating use 5,098 megawatts.

The largest groupings in Oregon are in Washington County and in the Boardman-Hermiston area near the Columbia River. Secondary groups can be seen at Prineville and The Dalles, but there are smaller batches as well. Some maps indicate a half-dozen or so small data centers are located in downtown Portland.

The push to build more of them has brought the subject to the fore, sometimes in unexpected places.

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Parts of the eastern Oregon data center belt seem uneasy about them too. On July 31, Oregon Rural Action said it would pursue a moratorium on expansion of data centers in the Umatilla and Morrow County area. 

This article was also republished in the Washington Post as of 08/24/2026.