Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they claimed they would, but of course they would never agree to such terms.

My stomach twisted because that can generally just mean one thing in my experience in the call center / tech support industry: outbound Medicaid/Medicare ripoff scam service calls.

Their DC never came to fruition, but a few others up here did. "Hundreds of jobs" didn't happen, they got maybe like 30 parts swappers and security dorks to run around an old Superfund site and play hardware babysitter.

A town a with a $50M budget can easily have a single large datacenter cover the townsfolk's entire tax bill, and then some. The worst part is the fan noise, but I am sure they can figure that out.

These things only become static "messes" or "blighted" because regulation prevents fire sale and pivot to a new use from being viable.

Or we could regulate that data centers be sound proof.

These are things we can solve. They just cost a little money so businesses will fight tooth and nail against it. But hey look we also used to dump slaughterhouse refuse and factory runoff straight into the river in the middle of cities. We don’t do that anymore because at some point it became illegal.

Easy peasy. Just make the things you don’t want businesses to do illegal and they’ll stop doing them.

We could even regulate that all data centers have a large public park and green space on its roof! Or be covered in solar panels to make its own power. Or a huge parking lot. Whatever we need or wish for, the billion+ dollar investment into the data center can provide.