SALT LAKE CITY -- Twitter Inc. has announced -- in a tweet, of course -- that it will build a huge data center in Utah, making it the latest company to set up computer-intensive operations in a state with cheap electricity and a business-friendly reputation.
The San Francisco-based company's engineering program manager, Jean-Paul Cozzatti, announced Wednesday that Twitter's technical operations would move to the Salt Lake City area.
Cozzatti said the move was necessary for the microblogging website to keep up with demand for a service with about 100 million users worldwide.
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said the state's tech-savvy work force makes it perfect for companies like Twitter.
Twitter will "contribute to the development of critical mass in our software and technology economic cluster, which has already attracted companies such as Oracle and eBay and has enabled Omniture and others to prosper," Herbert said Thursday.
Orem-based Omniture Inc., now owned by software maker Adobe Systems Inc., analyzes traffic for other companies' websites.
The state's utility, Rocky Mountain Power, was reluctant because of confidentiality reasons to confirm arrangements it would have to make for yet another data center in its service territory.
"Typically when a customer wants to locate here, they talk to us -- there are certain infrastructure requirements which they must pay," said utility spokesman Dave Eskelsen, who avoided any mention of Twitter.
"We have seen these facilities look to our service area because our prices are low -- we're in the lower fifth nationwide for electricity prices. It's only understandable that people with largest electricity needs would look to Utah," he said.
Most of Utah's power comes from coal-fired plants that export a lot of the electricity to other states.
Twitter spokesman Matt Graves said that the Utah center is the first "custom" data center Twitter plans to open over the next two years.
Twitter's social networking website lets people share information in "tweets," or messages limited to 140 characters. More than 300,000 people sign up for a Twitter account every day -- a rate of growth that has strained the company's computer servers.
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