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The other option is to not offer the tax breaks and if the company wants to build a data center, they also need to pay the taxes for it. If a state is dumb eno

The other option is to not offer the tax breaks and if the company wants to build a data center, they also need to pay the taxes for it. If a state is dumb enough to offer tax breaks that's on them. There's also not "competition" here. It isn't as if data centers have almost any positive local effects, beyond their property tax revenue. They have very few employees and if the property tax is cut they ultimately don't generate any income for the locality. I can tell you that as someone living in Idaho, I see no differences when I work with the datacenters in Oregon, Washington, or Utah. I'm not benefited in the slightest by the few Idaho datacenters that I interact with currently. It's the same argument that's been used to give sports stadiums sweetheart deals. These things have almost no local benefits and a lot of negative side effects with their presence.

papichulo2023 6mo ago
At this scale they ask different countries for tax breaks though
- cogman10 6mo ago
  Again, that's no sweet off my brow. It's not as if working with a datacenter in canada, mexico, or Ireland is all that different from one in the US. Especially when you start talking about what these are being used for, LLMs. The added latency for a datacenter being in China has zero impact on how I use it. There also isn't some magical expertise loss from these datacenters not being local. About the only risk is that the various governments become so hostile to people in the US using their datacenters as to apply taxes and fees on usage. Which is unlikely to say the least. The owners of these datacenters want them used and if they can convince a government to give them preferential treatment they can likely convince the same government not to tax their clients. I guess there is also the risk of the government spying on the incoming and outgoing prompts. But lets be really real here, that's unlikely to matter to almost anyone other than people working for our government.

papichulo2023 6mo ago

At this scale they ask different countries for tax breaks though

cogman10 6mo ago
Again, that's no sweet off my brow. It's not as if working with a datacenter in canada, mexico, or Ireland is all that different from one in the US. Especially when you start talking about what these are being used for, LLMs. The added latency for a datacenter being in China has zero impact on how I use it. There also isn't some magical expertise loss from these datacenters not being local. About the only risk is that the various governments become so hostile to people in the US using their datacenters as to apply taxes and fees on usage. Which is unlikely to say the least. The owners of these datacenters want them used and if they can convince a government to give them preferential treatment they can likely convince the same government not to tax their clients. I guess there is also the risk of the government spying on the incoming and outgoing prompts. But lets be really real here, that's unlikely to matter to almost anyone other than people working for our government.