Transform Your The Dalles Business with AI

The Dalles, Oregon sits where the Columbia River Gorge opens onto the high desert, a county seat of roughly 15,884 residents doing business at the intersection of two very different economies: a legacy river-and-orchard town and one of the earliest hyperscale data center hosts in the country.

Google broke ground on its first purpose-built data center here in 2006 and has since poured more than $1.8 billion into a campus that now tops 350,000 square feet, making the company Wasco County's largest taxpayer by a factor of seven and putting more than 200 people on its payroll inside city limits.

That single employer, layered on top of a working river economy built around The Dalles Dam, Oregon Cherry Growers' packing operations, and a Columbia Gorge tourism trade that pulls windsurfers and wine tourists through town every summer, gives The Dalles an unusually compressed labor market for a city its size.

Median household income sits at $62,614, per capita income near $44,763, and the poverty rate holds around 11 percent, a mix that reflects both good-paying tech and healthcare jobs and a still-substantial share of seasonal agricultural and hospitality work.

The cost of living index runs about 108 against a national baseline of 100, driven mostly by housing: the median home value has climbed toward the $400,000 to $500,000 range over the past year, a steep number for a town where many jobs still pay closer to Oregon's nonurban wage floor.

Oregon's statewide unemployment rate has hovered near 5.2 percent through 2026, and Wasco County tracks close to that figure, tightened further by Google's presence pulling technical talent out of the same small labor pool that local retailers, clinics, and orchards draw from.