Titan Data Center continues expansion
Lee Willis, manager at the Titan Building in Moses Lake, answers the phone. The business is expanding to accommodate more data center tenants.
MOSES LAKE - Officials with the Titan Data Center in Moses Lake are talking with companies in the telecommunications, banking, financial and medical fields about becoming tenants in their expanded building.
"We're basically building it to lease to someone else," said Avner Papouchado, president of The Red Sea Group, the El Segundo, Calif.-based owner of the Titan building.
There has been a good amount of interest in the building and The Red Sea Group is marketing to companies worldwide, he said.
Papouchado said they have now finished work on about 20,000 square feet, or more, of space out of 60,000 square feet.
"We will probably be able to open the market up to smaller companies that can have more operations in the area," Papouchado said.
It is different from the data center developments in Quincy, where companies, including Yahoo!, Intuit and Microsoft, built data centers.
Many of Quincy's data centers are "corporate deals," he said.
The Red Sea Group is building onto the Titan Data Center to lease to someone else.
The company also has land to build another building in the future.
He wasn't sure how many jobs would be created at full build out, but thought the building itself would have between 15 and 20 people.
Their current tenant has four people working in a 4,000 square-foot space.
Currently a large percentage of people employed at the Titan Data Center are from Grant County.
He said it is a "beautiful thing" to have the Titan building next to Big Bend Community College because graduates can be hired.
"We want to be good friends and neighbors," Papouchado said. "We don't want to be this building that's closed off and that we never know the people there. We want to be part of the community and provide opportunities for the community."
Grant County has environmentally-friendly electricity at "very good prices," he said.
Moses Lake is a good place to build data centers because the area offers fiber-optics, an accessible community and an extremely low threat risk for natural disasters.
Moses Lake isn't prone to floods and doesn't experience earthquakes or tornados, said Lee Willis, the Moses Lake-based manager of the Titan Data Center.
The accessibility of Grant County International Airport is also a great thing, he said.
Willis called the building "an extremely efficient data center that has one of the best efficiency ratings in the world."
Papouchado said their hope is to attract companies that bring more engineering and high tech jobs to Moses Lake, not large corporations.
They are working with companies outside Silicon Valley in California, as well as recruiting in Silicon Valley, Papouchado said.
In Moses Lake, the Titan Data Center never uses more than 5 megawatts of power.
"We're not going in here and saying power is less expensive," he said "We know we're a good sized power user and will do everything we can to use as little power as we can."
They are using mostly evaporated cooling in Moses Lake, which is the most efficient way to cool data servers and electronic equipment.
Their power usage effectiveness rating is about 1.3 or better, as compared to the industry-wide figure of 2.0, he said.
The Titan Data Center is working to obtain its expansion permit for the project from the state Department of Ecology (DOE).
The permit allows the company to add 14 backup diesel generators to the facility for backup power in case of an outage.
The generators keep the data servers running.
The DOE approved Titan's first permit in 2007 to let its tenant Ask.com install two generators, according to the state agency.
Papouchado said the company is also watching the data center tax exemption bill move through the state Legislature.
The bill extends a temporary tax exemption for companies buying replacement servers.
"It's very, very important," he commented.
A Facebook data center came to Prineville, Ore., a business he thought should have located in Grant County.
Terry Brewer, executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Council, said the Titan facility is a co-location data center like Sabey's planned location in Quincy.
He compared co-location data centers to a mall, where each store owner takes an amount of square footage and operates individual businesses.
The Seattle-based McKinistry is doing electrical work on The Titan Data Center.
Basin Refrigeration in Moses Lake is completing cooling system work.
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