One of Washington’s largest corporate tax breaks has grown alongside a data center boom in Central Washington, including this data center in East Wenatchee owned by the Sabey Corp. Despite forgoing more than $474 million since 2018, the state can’t say how many jobs were created by the tax break. During that same time frame, it also hasn’t evaluated whether the revenue loss was worth it.
Datacenters are absolutely not “job creators.” They are necessary for the life we enjoy, they are relatively clean as their major input is electricity and their output is heat. But huge fully functional DCs only need around 20people to run while providing zero local or even state revenue other then property taxes and whatever utility taxes are still applicable to them.
Obviously e-waste is a huge problem, but that is independent of the datacenter itself.