The World reports:

[VMWare's] plans, under review by Douglas County officials, call for a new 189,000-square-foot building at Intergate.Columbia, a data-center complex developed by Tukwila-based Sabey Corp. on 30 acres just east of Pangborn Memorial Airport.

VMWare -- the leader in server virtualization, now facing stiff competition from Microsoft -- will use the data center to expand research and development, the story continued.

A VMWare spokeswoman told The World that the company chose the site for its "sustainable hydropower" from Douglas County PUD. Other pluses attracting VM and other tech companies (including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Intuit and others) to the region: "a suitable climate for cooling," as VM's spokeswoman put it, and access to high-speed Internet connections.

This article in Data Center Knowledge calls the VMWare lease "another big win for Sabey, which has already leased the entire first building at Intergate.Columbia to T-Mobile. The VMware deal means that Sabey has pre-leased the vast majority of space at Intergate.Columbia."

Sabey, the article continues, has "built and currently operates some of the largest data centers in the country, including Seattle's 76-acre Intergate technology campus, one of the nation's largest multi-tenant Internet complexes, along with other past operations in Los Angeles and Denver."

Here's a story from last year with background on data center development in Quincy and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Washington.