Taxes would be great. If a giant new datacenter meant more money in the coffers for schools, roads, and everything else that is funded by local taxes, then that sounds like something that some places would really like to see.

But that's not how it rolls. At least around me, there instead seems to be a pattern of cities and counties of giving datacenter builds tax abatements of multiple decades in length.

And unlike something like a hospital or a steel mill or even a warehouse: After the local service industry and trades boom from the initial construction is over with, there's not much else coming out of these places. They don't provide very much in the form of long-term employment positions.

And beyond that, it's not like we know what the shape of information technology will be 30 years from now. It's certainly shaped very differently today than it was in 1996.

(And yeah, I know. If there were no tax incentives for datacenters in Location A, then they'd just build them in Location B instead. I don't have a problem with this at all, but some folks seem to find that result to be fundamentally unconscionable.)