Stop Writing Blank Checks to the Richest Companies on Earth
Data center incentives hand public money and public water to trillion-dollar firms while ratepayers cover the grid bill. Communities deserve a better deal.
The companies building AI data centers are among the most valuable enterprises in human history. They do not need help from a county commission, and yet county commissions keep offering it: decades of tax abatement, discounted power, and water commitments negotiated in closed sessions, all for facilities that employ fewer permanent workers than a mid-sized grocery store.
Follow the costs and the deal looks worse. Grid upgrades to serve concentrated compute demand land on everyone's utility bill, not just the data center's. Water drawn for cooling comes from the same aquifers farms and towns depend on. And the secrecy is not incidental; nondisclosure agreements routinely bind local officials before residents learn what was traded away in their name. When the incentive expires, the servers can move. The transmission lines, the drained reservoir, and the school budget built on an abatement that never converts stay behind.
None of this requires refusing the industry. It requires negotiating like the public matters: full-freight taxes or genuine clawbacks, metered water at sustainable rates, grid costs assigned to the load that created them, and every agreement public before it is signed. The companies will build anyway; compute demand, not a county's generosity, decides that. The only question is whether communities capture their share, or keep paying for the privilege of hosting someone else's fortune.