After a local TV station reported Tuesday that a potential Avista Corp. customer wants to build a large data center, the power company told journalists it had not given details about the facility sooner because “there was uncertainty around what we could confirm publicly.”
Spokanites had been nervously murmuring about the specter of a data center for months since proposed legislation that would have exempted new data centers from the state sales and use tax failed in the legislature. But while the public remained in the dark about the nature of the proposed “large load” project, Avista’s shareholders found out on May 5, more than a month prior.
At a quarterly earnings call that day between top Avista officials and representatives from Wells Fargo Bank, Barclays Bank PLC and Jefferies LLC, the utility disclosed the project was a data center. Data centers are energy-intensive facilities filled with servers and networked computers designed to store and manage electronic information generated by companies and other organizations, which purchase storage capacity in the centers…