[mediaman]

Loudoun County in Virginia generates $1 billion in property tax revenues from data centers.

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.

[no_wizard]

They’re an anomaly that benefits from a number of factors like being close to the government for contracting, early data centers built there and they tended to congregate and dumb luck.

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

[mediaman]

Oregon gave a lot of time-limited property tax breaks. They also don't have a sales tax.

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.

[bombcar]

Hopefully they don't end up with a "Digital Detroit" when datacenters start closing.

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.

[fc417fc802]

> that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.

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.

[valleyer]

The book is "Empire of AI". This blog post explains it pretty well: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

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.

[trollbridge]

Perhaps part of the problem here is that most towns that have proposals for AI data centres (including my own) have the developers demanding 10 year tax abatements, so we aren't going to see any of that tax revenue.