The hyperscalers aren't making sales directly from the data center, so there's not much to tax other than the land value, the electricity they use, and the few employee salaries.

You'd need some sort of data ingress/egress tax.

Where? What do you tax? Per request?

They will shuffle most gains around to the place with the lowest taxes. E.g. by internally buying and selling (overpriced) services.

The only realistic tax is coming from the jobs that serve those data centres (builders, maintenance, that little IT staff left for on-site jobs). And those are rather low margin jobs.

> Why don't they pay much in taxes? hyperscalers are pretty profitable.

I wouldn't be surprised if those profits are re-imagined as costs paid to some entity in a tax-haven.

Also there's different kinds of taxes. IIRC, local communities get their revenue from sales taxes and property taxes. A data center doesn't sell anything, so they probably get zero from that. I don't really know how they'd factor into property taxes, because they're a blight and I don't know how the locality would assess their value without comparable transactions.

Because company profits are booked at their European HQ (so Ireland or Luxembourg).

So there is little profit being taxed at the Datacenter/country Level.