American insurance firm The Travelers Companies announced in mid-May that its much talked-about Nebraska data center is now open for customers.
The facility, previously referred to by the shadowy moniker "Project Oasis," has been in the works since 2013 and much about it was kept under wraps until recently. The site was built to help supplement an older Georgia data center and sits on 140 acres of land outside of Omaha. The new center will serve as the company's main hub for data processing operations.
The land previously housed an old, wooden barn which had to be torn down to construct the data center. Parts of the facility incorporated design elements to pay homage to the site's history. A meeting room near the entrance to the building is adorned with a decorative roof gable from the barn, and some of the original siding points visitors toward photographs of the center's construction.
The Nebraska data center currently provides 30,000 square feet of raised floor computing space. Another 30,000 square feet are planned to be added in the near future. The site is supplied with redundant power from a new nearby substation constructed by the Omaha Public Power District. The majority of the equipment and building materials used for the facility came from local Nebraska businesses, and Travelers expects to employ at least 30 residents in the new data center.
Nebraska has become a popular state for service providers to build new facilities, as it offers generous data center tax incentives. Property and sales tax exemptions are offered to the companies operating the sites. Yahoo and PayPal both occupy facilities in the state, along with other big name tech companies.
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