Amazon Secures Massive Oregon Land Parcel for Potential Gigawatt-Scale Data Center Expansion
March 31, 2026
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has significantly expanded its land holdings in the Pacific Northwest, acquiring a 1,300-acre site in Morrow County, Oregon. The move signals the cloud giant's continued aggressive investment in data center infrastructure, particularly in a region known for its affordable power and established digital corridors, as demand for computing capacity, especially for artificial intelligence workloads, surges globally.
The land purchase near the city of Boardman is widely seen as preparatory for a major new data center campus. According to planning documents filed with Morrow County last year and reported by The Oregonian, a project on this land could eventually support up to 1 gigawatt of power capacity. The proposed development would encompass approximately four million square feet of floor space across 20 buildings, representing one of the largest potential data center constructions in the United States.
AWS has not yet publicly confirmed specific plans for the site. In a statement to GeekWire, the company said it had “recently purchased land in Boardman, Oregon,” but noted that “development plans are not final, and Amazon is performing our normal due diligence process as we develop new locations based on customer demand.”
The acquisition is a logical extension of AWS's longstanding presence in Oregon. The company began constructing data centers in Morrow County around 2011 and later expanded into neighboring Umatilla County. These facilities form the backbone of its US West (Oregon) cloud region. AWS's recent activity in the area has been intense; prior to this 1,300-acre deal, it was reportedly seeking an additional 400 acres near Arlington in early 2025, following a 376-acre purchase there the previous year. The cloud provider is also believed to be behind a separate $4.8 billion, 16-building campus under development in Walla Walla, Washington, just across the Oregon border.
However, AWS's expansion ambitions in Oregon have encountered infrastructure hurdles. In November 2025, the company filed a formal complaint against utility provider PacifiCorp, alleging failures to meet its power needs. AWS claimed one of its existing campuses had "insufficient power," a second had no power at all, and that PacifiCorp “has refused to even complete its own standard contracting process for the third and fourth data center campuses.”
Perhaps in response to such challenges, AWS moved to secure its own energy supply in January 2026 by acquiring the Sunstone project, a shovel-ready solar-plus-storage facility in Morrow County. That project aims to deliver 1.2 gigawatts of solar generation coupled with 1.2 gigawatts of battery storage to the grid, which could directly support the power-hungry operations of new data centers, including the potential development on the newly purchased land.
The scale of this land acquisition underscores the immense capital and resources hyperscale operators are committing to build out next-generation infrastructure. Successfully developing a campus of this magnitude would not only solidify AWS's cloud dominance but also place significant new demands on local power grids and water resources, highlighting the ongoing tension between rapid digital growth and community infrastructure.
Source: datacenterdynamics
