And the DC will employ, what, 20 people long-term? It’s not a factory.
(Farms don’t employ many people either.)
I can't eat the output of a data center, though.
I've been really enjoying eating soybeans. Absurdly good source of protein (yes, even for a bean), dirt cheap, decent source of fiber and a bunch of minerals, and pretty easy to just drop in a pressure cooker and eat however you like once it comes out.
Can't say I eat a lot of field corn or hay though.
Hay is the stalk of a grain plant. We take the grain off the stalk and make it into flour. A main ingredient in bread and pasta/noodle.
The point is that something tangible is produced.
Got any hard numbers on the tax revenue? I am skeptical because typically these projects receive tax payer money.
> Not to mention the nuclear power plant being built in response to the DC
A nuclear power plant takes 6-10 years to build in the US, and sometimes even longer.
According to the county FAQ: https://www.boxeldercountyut.gov/661/Stratos-Page-FAQ-Page
> What tax revenue is expected?
> In Phase One, the county expects to receive $30 million in annual tax revenue. When fully built out, it could generate up to $108 million every year.
"Could" generate 108 million a year
Naw man. These numbers need to be more concrete upfront. This sounds like "under ideal conditions (that we won't ever achieve)" weasling
This is for a standard "warehouse sized" 100MW facility no one would know exists unless you told them it does which has been there for 20 or so years now. It generates far more taxes for the municipality than buildings of similar footprint next to it, as it's in a light industrial park like most of these things are. Scaled up to 1GW that's $60m/yr in simple "sales tax" on electricity consumption. Property tax is harder to dig through, but ignoring initial 10-20 year abatements typical for such projects it's roughly double that - but that's from memory.
I agree the tax abatements are bullshit. But those are bullshit for any sort of development and imo should be outright illegal at a federal level regardless of the project.
This doesn't account for any local income tax/etc. generated by jobs - where a datacenter of course will not be significant compared to most industrial land uses of similar acreage.
These datacenter facilities have typically been very tax revenue dense land uses for quite some time now without cities needing to invest very much in infrastructure to service them. It's why they generally have sailed through approvals until recently.
Wow, that's a lot of electricity. What market is that electricity purchased from?
The locality tax is in addition to everything else paid on the electric bill.
And yes, datacenters have always been about converting electrons to photons, density of photonic output and electron input steadily increasing over time.
The bucket of money is from the food truck, the only business that can be sustainable from a DC in the local area. The food truck is cash only, because they payment company now charges 50% because they are using AI to counter the spam and fraud from the other companies using AI.