States Are Right to Compete for the Data Center Boom
Compute is the industrial base of the next economy, and the states winning it are doing what smart industrial policy has always done.
Every generation gets one infrastructure buildout that decides which regions prosper for the next fifty years. Railroads, interstates, and broadband each rewarded the places that said yes quickly. Data centers are this generation's version, and the states competing hardest for them are not being played; they are playing to win.
The case against incentives always sounds the same: the jobs are few, the tax breaks are large, the company would have come anyway. It misses what the facility anchors. Data centers bring transmission upgrades ratepayers alone would never fund, water and fiber infrastructure that outlasts any single tenant, and a property tax base that funds schools for decades after the abatement expires. Ask the counties that landed them a decade ago whether they regret it; the waiting list of counties asking for the next one is the answer.
Sovereignty is the quieter argument. The compute that trains and runs AI is strategic capacity, and it will be built somewhere. A state that declines it is not making a moral statement; it is exporting the tax base, the grid investment, and the leverage to another state, or another country, that will happily take all three. Competition among states to attract that capacity is not a race to the bottom. It is federalism doing exactly what it was designed to do.