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by Tanoc 22 days ago
Datacenters are financially a net negative for whichever municipality they end up in. They're operated mostly remotely with little staff and they have no tangible production, meaning any wealth they generate ends up vast distances away. Meanwhile the municipality ends up with increased costs because of the inefficiencies of bruteforcing computation, and because of the subsidies and tax breaks that the companies not only expect but demand for construction, there's no revenue being generated even for the local government.

That alone is enough of an argument against them.
1 comments
simianwords 22 days ago
Why did you not include the tax they bring in? I think this is a serious omission and points at motivated reasoning.

Can you do one where you account for the tax dollars and compare it to similar industries?

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Tanoc 22 days ago
Because in reality they don't actually bring in any revenue for the first few years thanks to all the subsidies and tax breaks they demand upfront before construction. At best it would be state and federal taxes used for operations that any operating business brings like federal payroll, but there wouldn't be any property taxes for at least five to ten years and the federal corporate income tax would likely be from the state the company is based in rather than the state the datacenter is based in. The municipality, be that the county or city the datacenter's in, gets screwed.

Meanwhile just to run a trucking depot you'd have the heavy vehicle tax, international fuel agreement tax, registration tax, sales taxes for the trucks and trailers, property taxes, and whatever incidental taxes required by the state you're operating in. The property tax, IFAT, and local payroll taxes meanwhile all go to the municipality and don't skip straight up to the state or national level. This is with no expectation of any of this being waived or delayed because the trucking industry doesn't have the surface visible financial performance of the industries municipalities are more lenient towards.

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simianwords 21 days ago
False. They bring in huge amounts of taxes.

> Over the past 20 years, the data center industry in Loudoun County has grown significantly. As a result, the amount of revenue that the county receives from personal property tax revenue on the computer equipment located inside data centers has also grown significantly. Currently, data centers occupy approximately 4 percent of commercial parcels of the land in the county; however, they yield 38% of general fund revenue collected by the county

38% of fund revenue for this county comes from data centres.

https://www.loudoun.gov/m/faq?cat=241

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