With Tax Initiatives, States Compete for Data Centers
With Tax Initiatives, States Compete for Data Centers
(The Hosting News) – U.S. lawmakers have long offered attractive incentives to businesses in attempts to bring jobs to their respective states. This week was no different. In both Nebraska and Missouri, tax bills received approval in state legislatures.
In Nebraska alone, with Bill 1118, data center operators would receive various tax breaks upon investing $ 300 million in facilities at the state level.
Then more specifically, there’s the matter of employment. Incentives provided for in the bill would also be based on a company’s ability to create up to thirty jobs.
According to the report from the Omaha World-Herald (Omaha.com), State Senator Abbie Cornett addressed the matter, stating “I believe this bill is absolutely essential to building Nebraska and providing good-paying, high-tech jobs for the state.”
Aside from just providing incentives for yet to be interested companies, there’s more to the story. It involves a big unknown company possibly considering Nebraska for a state of the art data center.
Project Edge is the code name for a tech provider looking to invest more than one billion dollars in data center construction, according to the Omaha World-Herald.
The state of Nebraska is already home to a 180 thousand square foot data center by Internet giant Yahoo! who opened the facility in 2010.
Meanwhile, Nebraska isn’t the only one hoping to attract attention from Project Edge. Just east from the state, Nebraska’s neighbor Iowa is the home to data centers by top tech companies Google and Microsoft. It’s an area that’s also in play.
Discussing the matter in a report from the Des Moines Register, West Des Moines’ economic development leader Clyde Evan focused on the selection process, stating, “We get contacted by a real estate agent. They won’t give us a card or a last name. We never know whom they represent.”
Despite the cloud of secrecy, the payoff for a state hosting a data center is big. Yahoo!’s Nebraska data center project alone was set to create around 200 jobs when launched around two years ago, according to a 2010 report from Data Center Knowledge.
The state of Missouri may not be in play for Project Edge, but it’s definitely hoping to receive some of the same success in the area of data centers.
Missouri’s tax incentive, according to a report from Ozarksfirst.com (Missouri News Horizon), received preliminary passage earlier this week and would provide tax exemptions to data center operators willing to invest five million dollars over a timeline of three years.
In August, a study reported on by the New York Times from Stanford Professor Jonathan G. Koomey found that power consumption by U.S. data centers fell well short of a previous estimation made by the EPA in 2007. The agency had predicted a doubling within five years. However, the result was simply an increase of just 36%. That doesn’t necessarily translate into a smaller role for the data center, but may simply show that energy efficiency technology is working.
In a still fragile U.S. economy, jobs from tech innovators are playing an increasingly significant role in turning things around even as the United States government moves forward with a plan to consolidate its Federal data center facilities with closures.
With Tax Initiatives, States Compete for Data Centers
