Update Feb. 2, 10:32 a.m.:

The Senate Ways and Means committee meets Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. to discuss this proposed tax break. An earlier version of this story said the committee was meeting Wednesday.

Earlier:

The state Legislature is considering a tax break for tech companies that want to build data centers in rural Washington after Microsoft moved its cloud-computing platform, Azure, out of Washington state last year.

The state Senate Ways and Means committee will take public comment on the proposed bill, Senate Bill 6789, on Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. in Olympia. A similar bill, House Bill 3147, has been proposed in the House, but no public comment has been scheduled.

The proposed bill would provide a 15-month exemption on sales tax on servers and related electrical equipment for companies that would build data centers in the state. The centers would have to be at least 20,000 square feet and be constructed between March 31, 2010, and July 1, 2011.

A business and city coalition called Washington Needs Jobs supports the legislation. Members include the city of Quincy; technology companies including Microsoft, Yahoo and VMWare; and developer Sabey.

Six companies built major data centers in Washington state between 2004 and 2007, including Yahoo and Microsoft. The city of Quincy in Grant County was an attractive place to build because of its cheap hydropower electricity rates.

Here is our earlier story on Microsoft's announcement that it was moving Azure, its cloud computing platform, out of Washington state. In 2009, Microsoft built large data centers in Chicago, San Antonio and Ireland. The company says it plans to spend $2 billion in capital expenditures in 2010.

Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools division at Microsoft, said in December that the Grant County data center was already at capacity when Microsoft decided to move Azure out of state. He did not address whether the lack of a tax break was a factor. In cloud computing platforms such as Azure, large amounts of software and data are stored on remote servers in data centers and accessed by users via the Internet. Examples of popular cloud services include Hotmail, iTunes and Flickr.

Microsoft has been running trials of Azure and is starting to sell it this month.