AWS Umatilla / Morrow County Campus (us-west-2)

The story

Located along the Columbia River in eastern Oregon, AWS built its us-west-2 anchor campus across Umatilla and Morrow counties beginning in 2011. Benefiting from cheap, clean hydroelectric power generated by federal dams on the Columbia River, the campus grew into one of Amazon's largest compute strongholds globally. AWS partnered with local irrigation districts to filter its cooling water runoff and redirect it to fertilize regional potato and onion farms. Today the campus houses massive clusters of AWS Trainium and NVIDIA accelerators powering cloud generative AI applications.

Notable

• Anchor of AWS's us-west-2 cloud region, housing dozens of server halls across Boardman and Umatilla.
• Draws low-carbon baseload electricity from the Bonneville Power Administration Columbia River hydroelectric system.
• Pioneered extensive agricultural water reuse: data center cooling discharge is piped to irrigate local crops.
• Hosts large-scale AWS Trainium, Inferentia, and NVIDIA GPU clusters for enterprise generative AI.

Expansions

• 2011: launch of AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) cloud region in Boardman
• 2018: campus footprint expands across multiple industrial parks in Morrow and Umatilla counties
• 2023: water circularity initiative certified returning cooling runoff to regional farms