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from the nice-dough,-if-you-can-get-it dept.
Kasia Tarczynska reports via Common Dreams:
Tech giants are successfully pressuring cash-strapped states and municipalities to provide massive subsidies to support their data centers, but the data centers create few permanent jobs for local workers.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, America's most well-known brands and most prosperous firms, are demanding that states and localities provide them ever-larger economic development subsidies to support their data centers. Last year these five tech giants reported nearly $120 billion in pre-tax profits, and yet they told states and localities they needed financial help to build new data centers, structures essential to their business operations. Their efforts resulted in more than $2 billion in public support to build 11 new data centers. The facilities would create 1,174 long-term jobs, amounting to an enormous per-job subsidy of $1.95 million, according to Money Lost to the Cloud ,[PDF] a new report from Good Jobs First, which I authored.
Data centers have enormous footprints. Apple's one in Maiden, NC has 500,000 feet of floor space, enough to fit nine football fields inside--and it is expensive, costing more than $1 billion, most of it for the endless racks of expensive servers and the powerful air conditioning required to keep the heat-spewing electronics cool. But despite this cost, the data center will employ fewer than 50 permanent workers, a subsidy of $6.4 million per employee, the most of any deal in our survey.
[...] Offering seven-figure-per-[job] subsidies is a losing proposition for taxpayers and communities. Utah officials realized this when they backed out of a recent $260 million 20-year data center subsidy deal with Facebook. They understand there were other opportunities for the industrial land where the project would be located, opportunities that would result in more jobs for local residents.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @07:27AM
Tax the data center and pay me not to burn it down.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Wednesday October 19 2016, @01:18PM
NOTE: I have only a high-level awareness of tax laws and subsidies; I'd appreciate it if someone who is more in-the-know could correct/clarify/expand on this comment.
In case it was not immediately obvious from the comment quoted above, there's more to a data center than just employee pay. There's the land on which it was built -- property taxes. There's the building housing all the equipment -- possibly included in property taxes. There's all the computers and networking equipment as well as HVAC and the like which, depending on the location, are possibly subject to taxes as well. When you are talking about a $1 billion facility, those taxes can add up.
I suspect that the subsidies mentioned are not so much payouts to the company as they could be reductions/exemptions in paying taxes on the property, building, and equipment.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday October 19 2016, @02:44PM
Yeah, and there are plenty of middle class residents to pay the taxes that the corporations do not pay.
Oh what, those same corporations are sending jobs overseas and the middle class doesn't have jobs to pay taxes? Not the companies problem.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh