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Comment by polski-g | Hacker News Reader

I like how you said "googling this", but then didn't actually read the article you linked.

> In general, data centers only pay corporate income tax if they generate revenue. Not all data centers do this because many don’t sell goods or services; they simply house servers. By qualifying as business expenses rather than revenue generators, they reduce the tax liability of their parent companies.

> Thus, when it comes to income tax, at least, many data centers – especially hyperscale data centers owned by large companies – don’t generate tax revenue because they don’t generate direct operating income.

They pay property taxes. The best tax there is as of now (LVT when)

I would be surprised if these developments didn't have tax abatement clauses.

For a datacenter that generates billions, that is not much.

"The datacenter" doesn't generate billions. The computations performed inside might, but almost never is the datacenter owner the same person running the servers inside. The owner is just leasing space; selling electricity and cooling to a third-party company. Their margins (ie: taxable income) are thin because competition is high. A landlord's taxable income is not determined by his tenant's income.

You are being pedantic to pretend you don't understand. It's tiring and unproductive.

At the end of the day, people are paying money to utilize the servers within the datacenter. That money is revenue. That revenue ought to be taxed by the state.

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