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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.

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