4 ms·

Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that

Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions. They're all drain.

tptacek 2mo ago
This is the opposite of the truth. For instance: https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora-are-flush-with-data-center-cash-they-differ-in-how-to-spend-it https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora...
- da_chicken 2mo ago
  No, it's exactly the truth: https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-are-competing-to-attract-data-centers https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-a... The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power.
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    You made a categorical claim. We can't both be right; one of us has to be wrong. So what's false in the report I just linked to?
  - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
    I'd think that the claim >Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions. is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken?
    - da_chicken 2mo ago
      11 states have them specifically for data centers. Most states have some form of this in general: https://www.michiganbusiness.org/services/pa-198/ https://www.michiganbusiness.org/services/pa-198/ What's more, having a statutory abatement is only one way to get around property taxes. What you also see are things like a industrial revenue bonds. Those don't require a special law. They just shift the tax burden to the public. Again, the idea here is that you're incentivizing investment and that will be offset by (a) jobs created by the facility, since labor doesn't get any tax abatement or deferment, (b) they will be bringing goods and service production to the area, and (c) eventually they will pay property taxes. For something like a traditional auto factory, that's a great incentive. The issue is that data centers have almost no local labor required. A single McDonald's is likely to employ more individuals than a data center will. And the service they provide is essentially independent of the location. It doesn't matter if it's nearby. That provides almost no advantage. And with such a small labor pool and such a large potential tax burden, there may be no economic incentive to remain in the location instead of building a new data center by the time you reach the end of the abatement.
      - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
        This notion that legislatures are blind to the number of jobs that will be created is contradicted by your previous link. You can scroll through table 2 for this- Alabama expects 20 jobs, Georgia 5-25, Nevada 10, etc. These states don't seem at all confused about how much local labor is required. And this is what they're setting as minimums; they believe that, absent mandate, the data centers would provide fewer jobs than these numbers. Any source that they're confused about (b)? I believed you about (a) until I read your source- the notion that they're getting misled by construction job numbers was plausible- but I can't imagine how a government would be so fundamentally confused about what data centers are as to believe they'll provide local services or somehow goods. What seems more likely to me is that the states/counties/cities believe that they will take in enough tax revenue while providing very little back in government resources that throwing in a discount works out just fine economically. I don't think you've made much of a case otherwise.
  - 10u152 2mo ago
    I work in construction, - data centres included - in Australia. From my experience you’re mostly right, however it’s more like, in order of priority: power availability, water availability, data availability, land price. Cost to upgrade upstream power transmission dwarfs all other costs. I’d note that after construction ongoing jobs are minimal. Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion. And probably 50% of those are low skill/income security,cleaning maintenance etc.
    - cucumber3732842 2mo ago
      > Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion. But that's not out of the norm for industrial activity. Like how many people do you think are actually working in an LTL hub or a paper mill or a food product factory at a given time? Probably about the same. You can see the parking lots and count cars on Google Earth. The towns are estatic because compared to something that generates physical emissions or truck traffic data centers are pretty clean and low risk as long as the noise can be controlled.
  - WarmWash 2mo ago
    A state and a municipality are different things.
- happymellon 2mo ago
  How is spending $24 million a year on taxes not evidence that they lobbied, and received tax breaks and exemptions? The reason they picked that location was because they get reduced rates. 50% off energy taxes. Reduced property taxes. I could go on. https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-for-data-centers/ https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-fo... Unless your arguing an example of a data centre that only received a tax break rather than exemption?
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc. A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less. It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead?
    - f4c39012 2mo ago
      You're missing the point. Towns come out ahead when the people living there come out ahead. I'm not arguing with your math, but your math is also a straight line to a town with no people at all being better. Towns are for _people_.
      - mlrtime 2mo ago
        It's for the people if they are stuck with a negative tax base and no way out. You either expand tax base or shrink it. A DC [can be] a good stop gap as it increases tax base for the city while not requiring additional services that cost tax dollars. Either that, or everyone's property taxes go up.
hinkley 2mo ago
One of the ways Californians prevented Walmarts from getting built was to prove how egregious a drain they were going to be. The stormwater runoff alone was breathtaking. Those parking lots and roofs are crazy.
- itsmek 2mo ago
  Walmarts have more stormwater runoff than Costcos?
  - hinkley 2mo ago
    I think you can do better than a whataboutism. First, Costco has some of the best employee treatment in the industry. Second, we are talking about blocking unwanted neighbors based on anything that will stick. We shouldn't have regulatory capture of socializing the liabilities and privatizing the profits, but we do and we have. Any resistance at all is by definition going to be a matter of coming at the problem sideways, up to and including fighting dirty.
    - itsmek 2mo ago
      I'm just addressing the text of your comment of incredulity at Walmart's building footprint. The tone of this one is different so I'll accept that as concession.
    - rangestransform 2mo ago
      Blocking unwanted neighbours with anything is exactly what NIMBYism is, and you could make similar arguments that housing developers are externalizing the burden of e.g. traffic or school capacity while privatizing the profits. Laws that enable arbitrary suppression of whatever the locals don’t like have caused generational damage via racism and now the housing crisis, and we should get rid of them.
      - hinkley 2mo ago
        Yep, and my free speech liberties mean that people can say horrible things to each other too. You can't have it both ways and we live in a society with people who have priorities that are misguided in different ways than our priorities are misguided. There's not one single person on this planet who is right all the time. Them's the breaks, wear a helmet. NIMBY mostly blocks things that don't already have regulatory capture. Blocking things that are is fighting fire with fire.

tptacek 2mo ago

This is the opposite of the truth. For instance: https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora-are-flush-with-data-center-cash-they-differ-in-how-to-spend-it https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora...

da_chicken 2mo ago
No, it's exactly the truth: https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-are-competing-to-attract-data-centers https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-a... The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  You made a categorical claim. We can't both be right; one of us has to be wrong. So what's false in the report I just linked to?
- ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
  I'd think that the claim >Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions. is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken?
  - da_chicken 2mo ago
    11 states have them specifically for data centers. Most states have some form of this in general: https://www.michiganbusiness.org/services/pa-198/ https://www.michiganbusiness.org/services/pa-198/ What's more, having a statutory abatement is only one way to get around property taxes. What you also see are things like a industrial revenue bonds. Those don't require a special law. They just shift the tax burden to the public. Again, the idea here is that you're incentivizing investment and that will be offset by (a) jobs created by the facility, since labor doesn't get any tax abatement or deferment, (b) they will be bringing goods and service production to the area, and (c) eventually they will pay property taxes. For something like a traditional auto factory, that's a great incentive. The issue is that data centers have almost no local labor required. A single McDonald's is likely to employ more individuals than a data center will. And the service they provide is essentially independent of the location. It doesn't matter if it's nearby. That provides almost no advantage. And with such a small labor pool and such a large potential tax burden, there may be no economic incentive to remain in the location instead of building a new data center by the time you reach the end of the abatement.
    - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
      This notion that legislatures are blind to the number of jobs that will be created is contradicted by your previous link. You can scroll through table 2 for this- Alabama expects 20 jobs, Georgia 5-25, Nevada 10, etc. These states don't seem at all confused about how much local labor is required. And this is what they're setting as minimums; they believe that, absent mandate, the data centers would provide fewer jobs than these numbers. Any source that they're confused about (b)? I believed you about (a) until I read your source- the notion that they're getting misled by construction job numbers was plausible- but I can't imagine how a government would be so fundamentally confused about what data centers are as to believe they'll provide local services or somehow goods. What seems more likely to me is that the states/counties/cities believe that they will take in enough tax revenue while providing very little back in government resources that throwing in a discount works out just fine economically. I don't think you've made much of a case otherwise.
- 10u152 2mo ago
  I work in construction, - data centres included - in Australia. From my experience you’re mostly right, however it’s more like, in order of priority: power availability, water availability, data availability, land price. Cost to upgrade upstream power transmission dwarfs all other costs. I’d note that after construction ongoing jobs are minimal. Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion. And probably 50% of those are low skill/income security,cleaning maintenance etc.
  - cucumber3732842 2mo ago
    > Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion. But that's not out of the norm for industrial activity. Like how many people do you think are actually working in an LTL hub or a paper mill or a food product factory at a given time? Probably about the same. You can see the parking lots and count cars on Google Earth. The towns are estatic because compared to something that generates physical emissions or truck traffic data centers are pretty clean and low risk as long as the noise can be controlled.
- WarmWash 2mo ago
  A state and a municipality are different things.
happymellon 2mo ago
How is spending $24 million a year on taxes not evidence that they lobbied, and received tax breaks and exemptions? The reason they picked that location was because they get reduced rates. 50% off energy taxes. Reduced property taxes. I could go on. https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-for-data-centers/ https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-fo... Unless your arguing an example of a data centre that only received a tax break rather than exemption?
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
  Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc. A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less. It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead?
  - f4c39012 2mo ago
    You're missing the point. Towns come out ahead when the people living there come out ahead. I'm not arguing with your math, but your math is also a straight line to a town with no people at all being better. Towns are for _people_.
    - mlrtime 2mo ago
      It's for the people if they are stuck with a negative tax base and no way out. You either expand tax base or shrink it. A DC [can be] a good stop gap as it increases tax base for the city while not requiring additional services that cost tax dollars. Either that, or everyone's property taxes go up.

hinkley 2mo ago

One of the ways Californians prevented Walmarts from getting built was to prove how egregious a drain they were going to be. The stormwater runoff alone was breathtaking. Those parking lots and roofs are crazy.

itsmek 2mo ago
Walmarts have more stormwater runoff than Costcos?
- hinkley 2mo ago
  I think you can do better than a whataboutism. First, Costco has some of the best employee treatment in the industry. Second, we are talking about blocking unwanted neighbors based on anything that will stick. We shouldn't have regulatory capture of socializing the liabilities and privatizing the profits, but we do and we have. Any resistance at all is by definition going to be a matter of coming at the problem sideways, up to and including fighting dirty.
  - itsmek 2mo ago
    I'm just addressing the text of your comment of incredulity at Walmart's building footprint. The tone of this one is different so I'll accept that as concession.
  - rangestransform 2mo ago
    Blocking unwanted neighbours with anything is exactly what NIMBYism is, and you could make similar arguments that housing developers are externalizing the burden of e.g. traffic or school capacity while privatizing the profits. Laws that enable arbitrary suppression of whatever the locals don’t like have caused generational damage via racism and now the housing crisis, and we should get rid of them.
    - hinkley 2mo ago
      Yep, and my free speech liberties mean that people can say horrible things to each other too. You can't have it both ways and we live in a society with people who have priorities that are misguided in different ways than our priorities are misguided. There's not one single person on this planet who is right all the time. Them's the breaks, wear a helmet. NIMBY mostly blocks things that don't already have regulatory capture. Blocking things that are is fighting fire with fire.