Google is coming to Berkeley County. The internet search company will invest $600 million in a data center at Mount Holly Commerce Park and create 200 jobs initially, Gov. Mark Sanford’s office announced Wednesday.
The jobs will pay an average of $48,000 a year, according to Data Center Knowledge. The center will run around the clock, with shifts spread over 24 hours so the work has little effect on traffic at rush hour, the governor’s office said.
“We are so pleased to formally announce our presence in South Carolina and our plans to build a data center,” said Lloyd Taylor, Google’s director of global operations, in the announcement. “We look forward to growing our business and becoming an active member of the Berkeley County community.”
“Given the stature of this company and the magnitude of this investment, this is a real win for South Carolina,” Sanford said in a statement.
The state Commerce Department had sent out invitations to a “significant economic development announcement” for Berkeley County on Thursday at Cypress Gardens, The Post and Courier reported.
Months of secrecy
The announcement ends months of speculation that began in December. That is when Maguro Enterprises LLC, a newly formed company with ties to Google, bought land off U.S. Highway 52 near Goose Creek, The Post and Courier reported. The project was code-named “Project X” and “Project Y,” and by last fall a company called Pyrite LLC had received a package of tax breaks and other incentives, according to the newspaper.
The governor’s office said a Google subsidiary bought the 520-acre site last year from Mt. Holly Commerce Park LLC, an economic development joint venture between Alcoa and Berkeley County. The purchase price was nearly $17 million, The Post and Courier reported.
Google started talking to South Carolina officials in the fall of 2005, said Rhett Weiss, the company’s head of strategic development, according to the newspaper. Weiss said he first visited the state that December and returned about a dozen times.
“We studied this site to death,” he told The Post and Courier.
Work is already well under way. Construction crews broke ground last month and started pouring foundations and putting up walls, The Post and Courier reported. Permit requests have been filed for roads, parking lots and buildings on up to 152 acres of the site, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.
What the state offered
Google applied for the state’s Job Development Credits and was approved by the Coordinating Council for Economic Development, the governor’s office said. The first $1 million of the credits may be advanced from the governor’s closing fund to partly reimburse the company for site preparation and infrastructure.
The Legislature also updated the tax code to exempt electricity and equipment purchases for this kind of facility from sales tax, as it does for manufacturers, according to the announcement. The state will grant Google $4.8 million in tax breaks over 10 years if it creates 200 jobs, The Post and Courier reported.
Google will pay an estimated $1.96 million a year in property tax to Berkeley County, the governor’s office said, about what 1,000 homeowners with $200,000 houses pay. The company has hired local engineering and construction firms to prepare and build the site.
“Google was upfront about what they needed to make this work and we were upfront about what we could do,” said Joe Taylor, the state’s secretary of commerce. “We are very glad we could make it come together to bring a marquee name like Google to our state.”
Why Berkeley County
Relatively cheap electricity and access to Lake Moultrie were among the main attractions, The Post and Courier reported. Google needs plenty of both to run and cool the computers that handle its internet searches, according to the newspaper.
The center will house a “server farm,” banks of computers that process Google searches, Gmail messages, and map and photo requests, the newspaper reported. Google’s building plan calls for cooling towers and a high-voltage electric substation, according to the newspaper.
Most of the hires will be engineers, electricians and programmers, The Post and Courier reported. Andy Johnson, who manages Google’s East Coast infrastructure, told the newspaper the first group of employees will start around the end of the year. The site could someday hold 400 employees in a series of buildings, the newspaper reported.
Google has kept quiet about its plans for security reasons and to avoid tipping off competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo, which are also looking for data center sites, the newspaper reported.
A building spree
The Berkeley County center is part of a wave of Google construction in the Carolinas. The company is building a similar data center in Lenoir, N.C., The Post and Courier reported, and is evaluating a site near Columbia, the governor’s office said. Google says the two South Carolina sites are not competing with each other.
A company affiliated with Google recently bought 466 acres near Blythewood, about 20 miles north of Columbia, The Post and Courier reported. The Richland County site is in the permitting process.
Google’s business is booming. Its profit almost doubled last year to $3.1 billion on $10.6 billion in revenue, and it spent $1.9 billion on capital projects, the newspaper reported.
