I want to continue to build data centers, but I dont really want one in my back yard either. But New York seems to be hurting itself lately, the states job growth has slowed over the past few years. This reminds me of them canceling the Amazon HQ.
Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they claimed they would, but of course they would never agree to such terms.
The data centers weren't going to go into NYC, but upstate New York has plenty of space for Data Centers. Oswego has two power plants, and could use two more. Building is good.
> Over the past 10 years the number of farms and amount of land actively being farmed in the United States has steadily decreased. Between 2015 and 2025 the number of farms decreased by almost 10 percent and the land being farmed dropped by more than 4 percent. The changes in New York in this period have been more dramatic, with 15 percent fewer New York farms and 11 percent less land in farm production than in 2015.
https://www.osc.ny.gov/reports/new-york-farms-and-farmland-d...
National trend:
My stomach twisted because that can generally just mean one thing in my experience in the call center / tech support industry: outbound Medicaid/Medicare ripoff scam service calls.
Their DC never came to fruition, but a few others up here did. "Hundreds of jobs" didn't happen, they got maybe like 30 parts swappers and security dorks to run around an old Superfund site and play hardware babysitter.
A town a with a $50M budget can easily have a single large datacenter cover the townsfolk's entire tax bill, and then some. The worst part is the fan noise, but I am sure they can figure that out.
Its states and federal usually offering tax breaks. But at least on the lowest level, it's pretty cheap to buyout a rural town, and that's why you get these town councils voting 9-0 to approve the projects before anyone even hears about it.
As for Amazon HQ, I don't know what NY's deal was but I was in Boston when it was a consideration and the amount of tax breaks they wanted was insane and would have been a huge net loss for the city. I'm very glad it wasn't moved there. It doesn't matter if you create a few thousand jobs if you get literal billions in tax breaks, it's a net loss for the state.