NTT Global Data Centers opened part one Feb. 25 of a planned five data center campus on 47 acres in Hillsboro.

The first space is a retrofit of the SunPower solar panel factory, but the next four will be new construction.

It was one of two data centers NTT launched last week. The other is in Chicago.

Bruno Berti, vice president of product management, said Hillsboro was selected for its reliable and moderately priced power. Like Los Angeles, Hillsboro is also one of only two places, or landing stations, where transatlantic data cables come ashore in the United States from Asia. There are approximately 406 submarine cables in service around the world. The one that comes to Oregon lands in Hillsboro and is split up and runs up and down the coast bringing data to the west.

According to NTT, cloud services, content, games, and mobile device communications drive 95% of global internet traffic through subsea cables. Demand is only growing as more people turn to web browsing, e-commerce, online gaming, and streaming video.

Berti explained that the global pandemic increased the demand for bandwidth.

“Increases in people working from home, distance learning, e-medicine, video streaming, online shopping and gaming are creating unprecedented data demands,” he said. Hillsboro also has no sales tax and an enterprise zone program property tax abatement to new data centers for up to five years.

NTT also likes Washington County’s green power options — the promise from PGE that windmills and hydro plants made the electricity.

“From a cost perspective, it’s pennies on the per kilowatt-hour,” Berti says. Oregon businesses usually pay less than a dime. During the Texas power outage in February, some customers were billed at $9 a kilowatt-hour, up from the usual 12 cents.