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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

Amazon and FAMGAN in general's take is far, far more than is recognized.

Example: datacenters that cost more than $xxx million to build received special tax breaks, which means that only the largest, big tech companies received them.

https://www.crn.com/news/data-center/sweeping-data-center-ta...

No sales taxes.... but you must spend a minimum of 50 million a year for 5 years.

Company that wants to build a mid size, 30 million dollar datacenter? No tax breaks. This is a barrier to entry for smaller would-be competitors and those that would prefer to have their own machines.

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Breaks for projects of that scale are often negotiated ad hoc- the list break is more of an advertising move than anything.

I would bet dollars to donuts that if a mid sized company wanted to build a $30 mil data center, local and state governments would be willing to work something out, especially if the location would bring construction and long term jobs and other investments to an otherwise underserved area.

>and long term jobs

Very few. A datacenter might only have a few dozen people as I understand it.

Some writing on this: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-data-centers-fail-t...

Lots of jobs during build. But after that, 10 guys on a security rotation 24/7, 5 guys on 'take stuff out of boxes and put it in racks to replace failed components' duty, and 5 more to do all the certifications and paperwork (who might be offsite).

I think an Amazon datacenter is going to have a few more people than that because it's so huge. I just looked at the satellite image of their Ashburn datacenter in Google Maps. I saw maybe like 50-ish cars.

Which, by way of context, is about how many people work at two McDonalds'.

One thing to note, as mentioned in my reply to your main comment, is that many of those cars are not owned by local jobholders in the community but rather contractors which travel to various data centers across the US as maintenance requires.

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