Online auction giant eBay has decided to build a $334 million computer center in the Salt Lake Valley, state and company officials said Monday.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company has purchased land in South Jordan in the Daybreak Commerce Park, a 250-acre, light-industrial development at 6801 W. Old Bingham Highway. Last June, the state said the eBay facility was estimated to cost $334 million to build.

The Governor's Office of Economic Development offered the company $27.3 million in tax incentives over 10 years to build the facility in Utah. The center is expected to employ about 50 people with wages averaging $49,200 a year, not counting benefits, or 150 percent of the Salt Lake County annual median wage.

The jobs are expected to generate new state wages of $23.7 million over 10 years, with additional state tax revenue expected to exceed $109 million during the same period. The Governor's Office also projects new revenue for the state of more than $109 million over a 10-year period.

The facility will help operate eBay's Internet commerce sites eBay.com, PayPal, Skype and shopping.com, along with dozens of others the company runs.

Jose Mallabo, eBay director of corporate communications, said the company would design a facility with environmentally friendly features to balance the large amounts of electricity needed to run computers and keep them cool.

"Think of thousands of computers running 24-7," he said. "The facilities to maintain the security of those are historically big energy suckers. So we manage that for environmental and cost reasons."

The facility will be one of several eBay computing centers in the United States and Europe, said Mallabo, and with new technology will allow eBay to better serve 84 million active users in 39 countries.

The company chose Utah because it already had a relationship with the state through a call center it operates here and because of the available infrastructure, he said.

Jason Perry, executive director of the Governor's Office of Economic Development, said Utah's strong high-tech industry and the availability of a qualified work force are factors in attracting such operations as eBay's.

"The cost of power is relatively low," Perry said, also calling Utah's telecommunications facilities "exceptional."

The eBay center is the second large computer operation to locate in the Daybreak Commerce Park, which sits on the northwest corner of the Kennecott Land Daybreak development, a complex of housing, retail and business buildings. Oracle, a business software developer, broke ground on its global information technology center in October.

Scott Kaufmann, vice president for commercial development at Kennecott Land, said the park is a desirable area for computer centers because of state's incentives, the availability of such resources as fiber-optic cable communications and because it has relatively little earthquake activity.

"The seismic activity is fairly minimal up there," Kaufmann said. "The utility infrastructure is very strong."

tharvey@sltrib.com