Fortune Data Centers, a Silicon Valley company that contracts with companies to provide wholesale online data storage, said this morning that it will open a 240,000-square-foot data center on 15 acres in Hillsboro.

The facility – in an enterprise zone that exempts the company from property taxes on its equipment – will employ between 20 and 40 people.

“We chose Oregon because it has excellent energy and communications infrastructure as well as a favorable tax structure for capital investment. For example, tenants who update and replace IT equipment pay no sales tax, which translates into as much as 30% yearly savings for their data center operations,” Matt Mochary, chief exeuctive of Fortune Development Group, said in a written statement this morning.

It's the second Hillsboro data center announced this week. On Monday, Digital Realty Trust said it will build a data center on 5.1 acres for data management company NetApp. The Portland Business Journal said this morning that Adobe also plans a Hillsboro data center, and Intel already operates a big data center at its Jones Farm campus across the street from the Hillsboro Airport.

Data centers provide the brains behind the Internet, storing huge volumes of corporate and personal information and increasingly doing sophisticated data processing, too. They’re springing up from coast to coast as companies and individuals move more of their information online, where storage costs are cheaper and the data can be accessed from anywhere.

Data centers don’t employ large numbers of people – the computers do most of the work – but they are very expensive to operate because they consume huge amounts of energy and require high-end corporate servers that run them. Earlier this week, Intel credited sales to data centers as a major factor behind its unexpectedly strong third-quarter results.

Oregon’s relatively low power costs, its mild climate (data center computers run hot, and the facilities must be cooled to keep from overheating) and Oregon’s enterprise zone tax exemptions make the state an attractive home to data centers.

Google and Facebook each built their first major corporate-owned data centers in Oregon – in The Dalles and Prineville, respectively. Amazon recently turned on a data center near Boardman, and officials in eastern and Central Oregon say a project for Rackspace is also in the offing.

Fortune Data Centers’ new Hillsboro project is already under construction. The first phase will offer 7.8 megawatts of power capacity, and will be running by next summer.

-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; phone: 503-294-7699