PRYOR, Okla. — A Germany based tech company is coming to the campus of the MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor, Oklahoma bringing jobs and economic investment.
Northern Data plans to build its North American Operational Headquarters in Pryor on 116 acres of land.
A 100-square foot building will house the first installment of the project. The company hopes to have operations running within 24 months.
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Future plans call for establishing an entire campus, with five additional buildings at the MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor, bringing more than 150 high paying jobs.
Northern Data plans to eventually serve as a hub for high performance computing data centers, offering businesses the opportunity to purchase processing power at competitive prices.
President and CFO Christopher Yoshida says at its core, Northern Data is a cloud computing company. They plan to scale bitcoin production and become a cloud service provider.
When asked why Northern Data selected Oklahoma, Yoshida said while location and proximity to power were factors, relationships also played a role. And they want partners who want to foster their growth, and access to the community.
“We are an employer,” Yoshida said, “and we need applicants, we need capable people, we want to work with the local universities , here we’re at the crossroads and we thought Oklahoma made a perfect fit for us and checked all the boxes.”
Yoshida, it turns out, has known Oklahoma’s Commerce Secretary Scott Mueller for a decade. He decided to give Pryor a look at Mueller’s suggestion.
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Founder and CEO Aroosh Thillainathan talked about why he selected Oklahoma:
“After we saw the potential and the people here, we saw so much more,” Thillainathan said.
He says he was surprised at the quality of how the MidAmerica Industrial Park is being built and operated.
“We looked into different other places,” he noted, “but after meeting all these amazing people, we were like, we want to do it here.”
They’re putting their money where their mouth is. Northern Data plans to invest approximately $270 million dollars by 2024, with plans to create more than 300 jobs in the long term.
“The last decade has been focusing on storage, not processing power,” Yoshida explained, “we are a processing power, and there’s three well known incumbents, one of them happens to be our neighbor now in MidAmerica, we’re very excited about, and we think we can disrupt them from a price point.”
In addition to being competitive, Northern Data will also offer the opportunity to partner with local high school students who are excited about internship possibilities
“With our generation, I feel like technology is everything,” said Mallorey Sanders, a senior at Salina High School. “We continue to use it in every single day in school, and college and the rest of our life more than likely.”
Northern Data will purchase up to 250 megawatts of power from Grand River Dam Authority, which has a facility at the industrial park.
Commerce Secretary Scott Mueller said this played a role in the company’s decision to locate to Oklahoma where over 40% of the electricity state wide is generated from renewable sources.
“It’s inexpensive, it’s highly reliable, it’s an even higher percentage here in this part of the state,” Mueller said, “that’s important to them for their efforts to be responsible for the environment.”
Mueller said it’s also important for Oklahoma to host them for the terrific jobs this is going to bring for families in this part of the state.
He says there were no tax incentives offered to lure Northern Data here.