Apple Prineville data center, Prineville, Oregon

Apple's data center campus in Prineville, in Crook County, Oregon, sits beside Meta's much larger campus in a town two tech companies have reshaped. Apple has released far less about its Prineville site than Meta has, and did not respond to The Source's questions for a July 2026 story on the town's data centers.

Apple's arrival was reported in April 2012, when the company, under the code name Maverick, struck a deal with the city and county exempting the project from most of its property taxes. In return Apple committed a minimum investment of $250 million and at least 35 jobs, after paying $5.6 million for 160 acres. In 2015 Apple halted plans for a second data hall during a legislative fight over a data center tax, then went ahead once Governor Kate Brown signed a bill ending that threat.

Both companies negotiate their tax exemptions with city and county leaders through Oregon's long-term rural enterprise zone program. In exchange, the city collects utility fee revenue, which has risen from about $430,000 in 2011 to nearly $11 million, close to three times the city's annual property tax take. Crook County Schools gave up $10 million in local revenue to corporate tax exemptions in 2019, and by 2024 that had nearly tripled.

City leaders are pleased with the trade-off. City Councilor Steve Uffelman said, "We are more financially stable now than we have ever been because of the revenue generated by the data center." Not everyone agrees: Karl Wilkerson, co-owner of the downtown diner Dad's Place, said, "To me it hurts the economy, it doesn't help the economy. It's not like it's benefitting us from having that up there."

Prineville leaders say they likely won't offer a full property tax break to the next data center that comes around. City Manager Steve Forrester told Governor Tina Kotek's Statewide Data Center Advisory Committee on June 26, 2026 that the city will roughly double its property tax revenue once Meta's first exemption expires. In March 2026, state lawmakers blocked new data center projects from enterprise zone tax breaks until the summer of 2027, and the advisory committee is due to report its recommendations by October 2026.