Repeal or Limit Tax Incentives and Subsidies

Sales and use-tax exemptions for data centers are often granted at the state level. This strips valuable tax money away from communities—especially public schools, since property taxes remain the largest source of K-12 funding. Because data centers are so extremely capital-intensive, exempting them from the corporate personal property tax is a very lucrative subsidy.1

Local governments must protect against this extraction through the following actions:

  1. For a comprehensive overview of how data center subsidies undermine state budgets, see LeRoy and Tarczynska, Cloudy With a Loss of Spending Control. ↩︎