Amazon Web Services (AWS) is opening a new data center in Oregon, arguably one of the most popular regions in the world for the new wave of data center development.

The AWS data center is located in Boardman, along the Columbia River. The Columbia is a popular spot for data centers. Data centers there enjoy cheap hydroelectric power and low costs for cooling. Google has a data center in the Dalles, Or. Microsoft and Yahoo! have data centers upstream on the Washington side of the river.

This is Amazon’s seventh data center and its fourth in North America. It is the second data center has built on the West coast. It also has a data center in northern California.

According to a post by Jeff Barr on the AWS blog:

The new US West (Oregon) Region supports the following services:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related services (Elastic Block Store, Virtual Private Cloud, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling).
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
Amazon SimpleDB.
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS).
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).
Amazon Elastic MapReduce.
AWS CloudFormation.
Amazon CloudWatch.

Services Angle

The need for new data centers is overwhelming. Data is scaling for everyone, which has correlation to app development and especially the new services economy.