US retail giant Walmart is shopping for a new data center site which will play home to a US$100m facility.

 

The Colarodo Spring Gazette reported last week that Walmart was considering its home town for the project.

 

Denver-based Walmart spokesperson Josh Phair told the Gazette: "At this point, I can only confirm that we are considering a data center project in Colorado Springs. . . Beyond that we are going through additional details and a due diligence process. That’s kind of where we are."

 

According to the paper, the Colarado Springs Regional Economic Development Corp (EDC) and local government and state officials are looking to establish incentive packages to encourage Fortune 500 companies such as Walmart to the region. Tax rebates, it said, could be worth millions.

 

The EDC, however, said that Walmart is also considering another city, but did not mention who the competition is.

 

Colarado Springs boasts low power costs and a highly educated skills force, and a low risk of natural disasters.

 

Walmart’s data centers are used for its data processing, reconciliation, product replenishment and debit and credit transactions.

 

Walmart has been pushing forward with the transformation of its UIT in recent years. It said it plans to spend US40m on its e-business infrastructure to make processing time faster and replacing IBM mainframes with new IBM eServer Z900 mainframes, and introducing UIBM’s Shark Enterprise Storage Servers.

 

Walmart is heavily dependent on technology. It was one of the first retail stores to enforce the use of radio-frequency identification technology tagging on all products in store for automated supply chain management.