Manufacturing's loss is data center's gain.

• Position: Western

Nearly two years after Springfield, Mo.-based boat builder Mako Marine International Inc. closed its plant in Forest City, Facebook Inc. announced it would spend $450 million to create a data center at the site. Completion is slated for early 2012. The 40 or so jobs promised by the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social-networking giant don't come close to matching the 150 that went down with Mako, but they show once again how western North Carolina has become a magnet for high-tech data centers, aided by cheap electricity and available land. "The main thing is that the infrastructure they need is here," says Glenn Bottoms, professor of information-management systems and economics at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs. "They can put in all the special, fast Internet lines they need--T1, T4 or whatever--and Rutherford County, with its decline in textiles, has a lot of space available. Data centers can be not only capital-intensive but land-intensive."

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Apple Inc. is building a $1 billion data center that will employ about 50 in Maiden, and Google Inc.'s $600 million data center eventually will employ about 210 in Lenoir. T5 Partners Inc., based in Atlanta, says it will build a shell to house a server farm on 260 acres in Cleveland County, and Wipro Ltd., an Indian information-technology company, said a few days after Facebook's announcement in November that it would open a $75 million...