A Kansas data hosting company says it's ready to start building a massive 100-megawatt data center on more than 90 acres in Hillsboro.

QTS Data Centers is the latest in a series of large data companies to build in Hillsboro, drawn by lucrative tax breaks worth $7.6 million altogether over the past three years. Those breaks are getting less valuable, though, after Hillsboro moved in 2016 to tie the value of those tax breaks to jobs created.

Those changes came amid concern that Hillsboro was serving up tax breaks to companies that occupied a lot of prime industrial or farm land but provided very few jobs.

Six large Hillsboro data centers employed just 71 people altogether last year, according to public records. In 2017, that worked out to more than $47,000 in tax breaks for each job created. Data centers receiving tax breaks include facilities owned by Comcast, Adobe, Flexential (formerly ViaWest), T5 Data Centers, Infomart and NetApp.

QTS, which leases space in its data centers to other companies, purchased 92 acres in Hillsboro last fall for $26 million. At a data center conference in Portland earlier this month, QTS Vice President Lane Anderson said "we're seeing lots of interest" and said the company about to begin construction in Hillsboro.

Data centers use huge volumes of power but the computers do all the work, meaning there is very little direct employment. QTS' facility will be 100 megawatts when fully built out, Anderson said.

That's equivalent to the power used by 80,000 Northwest homes - more than double the number of households in all of Hillsboro.

QTS did not provide additional comment about its timetable for building the Hillsboro server farm, which will be on Northwest Brookwood Parkway near the Topgolf driving range and entertainment center.

Tax breaks are especially important for data centers, which spend tens of millions of dollars to equip their facilities with high-end computers that would otherwise be subject to local Oregon property taxes. Informart's Hillsboro data center, for example, had an assessed value of more than $52 million last year.

QTS' property in a specially designated "enterprise zone," which exempts QTS from the property taxes that other businesses pay. However, in 2016 the Hillsboro City Council made changes to its enterprise zone program that ties the tax benefits to job creation.

Companies receiving a tax break of more than $20,000 per job created now must pay back one-third of their tax break in each of the first three years, and half the tax break in the last two years.

That money goes into a "community service fee" used for workforce development programs, including community college scholarships, a work skills development center, and a food entrepreneurship program.

Hillsboro originally adopted the state's economic development program wholesale, according to Dan Dias, the city's economic development director. The city's new policy aims to get more from enterprise zones, he said.

"This was a way to, I would say, refine the overall program," Dias said. "There is a focus on jobs with that policy change."

Tax breaks are Oregon's primary draw for data centers but they're not the only one. The state's power costs are relatively low, Hillsboro is close to transpacific communications cables that land on the Oregon coast, and property is inexpensive compared to other markets.

So Hillsboro remains attractive to the industry, despite the rollback in tax breaks.

Data centers may not care for the new, more expensive approach, said Larry Holt, vice president of business development for regional economic agency Greater Portland Inc. But that doesn't cause the economic development community much consternation, Holt said, because data centers aren't significant employers.

"My organization is judged on jobs," Holt said. "We want to see new employers come in that bring good, middle-wage jobs."

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