(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As National Security Agency prepares to build a $2 billion Utah data center, business software developer Oracle (www.oracle.com) has frozen construction on a $313 million data center project it began building in 2008.
According to a report from the Salt Lake Tribune, Oracle quietly stopped construction on the 200,000-square-foot facility three months ago, after breaking ground in October 2008. Located in West Jordan, a rapidly growing suburb of Salt Lake City, the data center was “put it on hold for a little while” until the economy rebounds, economic development spokesman Mike Sullivan told the newspaper.
The construction delay happened at roughly the same time as Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. While the two events could be purely coincidental, Oracle may have reasoned that Sun’s new data center in nearby Broomfield, Colorado and a planned $260 million Oracle facility in Colorado Springs would suffice for the near future.
While the Governor’s Office of Economic Development was originally enthusiastic about the Oracle project, which would have had a payroll of about $7.3 million, local government officials have expressed their pleasure surrounding the much larger NSA data center to be built in Utah.
