And a data centre brings absolutely no economic benefit whatsoever to its local community, unlike something like an auto plant that creates entirely new supporting industries to support it and its employees.
Their is typically high paying jobs in factories but these places dont employ a large staff beyond construction. It a tough spaces.
You're right though, that municipalities often waive taxes to woo big projects.
Following that logic, are you suggesting that data centers should not be built at all?
It funds half of all of their expenditures.
Can you imagine having half of your total municipal government budget being paid for by data centers?
Their citizens pay much lower property tax rates, and get much better schooling and police.
Henrico County (also VA) took $60 million in unexpected new revenues from data centers and created an affordable housing trust that is subsidizing low-cost housing.
Although these counties are figuring it out, it's an incredible failure in imagination for many of these liberals in other states to look at an immense source of new funding that could support schools, housing and health and just spurn it because they heard from a friend of a friend that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.
They’re an outlier and don’t really prove much of anything.
Oregon has lots and lots of data centers and not much to show for it on any front, other than higher electric prices for consumers
So I would agree that giving away the #1 way that data centers contribute to the government isn't optimal, though you could argue it's a long-term play.
As the tax break terms expire, Oregon will get $450 million in annual property taxes from the data centers, or about 1.4% of the state budget.
Though even if the AI market collapses, the capital spent means they'd probably keep operating; paying for 30 employees is much different than paying for 3,000 at a factory. But the datacenter might be owned by the creditors at that time.
How exactly do you think they dissipate the heat of a continuous 100 MW or 1 GW power draw? I have no idea what book you're referring to but you can do the math yourself it's quite straightforward.
Basically, the author (of the book) compares a data center outside Santiago to usage of water by humans, erroneously imputing that the average human uses only 200 cc of water per day.