alt Hacker NewsHow is spending $24 million a year on taxes not evidence that they lobbied, and received tax breaks and exemptions?
The reason they picked that location was because they get reduced rates.
50% off energy taxes.
Reduced property taxes.
I could go on.
https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-fo...
Unless your arguing an example of a data centre that only received a tax break rather than exemption?
Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc.
A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less.
It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead?