In 2010, as the country still reeled from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, tech companies, real estate developers and rural lobbyists went to the state Capitol in Olympia to press for a tax break for data centers.
Turning it down, supporters argued, would mean rejecting high-paying, long-term and environmentally friendly jobs in distressed parts of rural Washington. Owners of data centers — gargantuan facilities filled with computer servers that power the internet — were scouting Washington and other states for new homes.
“In the end,” then-state Sen. Rodney Tom, D-Medina, who advocated for the tax break, told his Senate colleagues, “we get the clean jobs that all the states are competing with, as far as the jobs it takes to run these things long term.”
State lawmakers nearly unanimously passed the special exemption and have kept the benefits flowing to the industry ever since. But the tax break has strayed from its original promises, and the state failed to fully scrutinize whether the sacrifices were worth it, a deep examination of legislative archives, public tax disclosures and utility data by The Seattle Times and ProPublica revealed.
We did this here in Sweden…
Datacenters provide almost no local jobs, yeah sure, one or two technicians, a few security guards and one or two janitors, but that’s it.
Datacenters doesn’t need a lot of local staff once built.
Meanwhile, they draw a huge ammount of energy at a super low cost that won’t support upgrading infrastructure.
Microsoft has experimented with self contained underwater datacenter pods, which has no local staff and super cheap cooling.
If it’s a colo data center I can see it bringing lots of local jobs. For each unique tenant in the building they’ll need at least 1-2 people within driving distance. But if it’s just like a big remotely managed AWS data center… not so much.
Why would you need 1-2 techs per client?
That seems extremely inefficient
No the DC won’t have 1-2 techs per client, the clients themselves will have at least 1-2 techs or sysadmins or what have you to manage the hardware. And those guys will need to be somewhere in the general vicinity of the DC to go there if there’s a problem, physical inspections, etc.
It wouldn’t necessarily create jobs at the DC itself but in client companies utilizing it.