On August 31 Donald Trump wrote that the only reason a community would refuse a data center is that it wants to end up backwards and poor. He promised far lower taxes and jobs all over the place. He told Americans to let Data Reign. He warned them not to kill the Golden Goose. Then he said China could not be happier about the opposition.
Start with the jobs. Building one of these places takes 2,400 to 5,000 workers and about a year and a half. Then the crews leave. The finished building runs on 25 to 50 permanent staff. Illinois passed a law saying a data center has to create 20 jobs to get its tax break. Out of 27 subsidized data centers in the state, 22 created exactly 20 jobs. Not 21. The number is the legal floor, and capital is just doing the bare minimum to meet that requirement. Workers are the thing you use up during construction and let go when construction ends.
Now the taxes. In Orangeburg, New York, JPMorganChase is getting 77 million dollars in tax breaks for one permanent job. That money does not disappear. The school district and the county are the ones who pay for that tax break. Working families cover the hole through property taxes, and through community services that quietly get worse. The tax break is claimed by the capitalists, and the tax bill goes up for the people.
Then the bill comes a second time. PJM runs the power grid for 13 states, and its own market monitor found that data center demand added 9.3 billion dollars in costs in a single year. Every household on that grid pays it back through the electric bill. Ohio families are already paying about 16 dollars more a month for power they never used. In July, the Congressional Research Service found that roughly 97 percent of the water these buildings use on site comes out of public drinking water systems. The same pipes that serve your kitchen and your hospital. They take that water because it is already treated, which makes it the cheapest water to run through a cooling tower. So you get exploited at work, and then you pay again at the meter and at the tap.
Trump’s line about plenty of other places that want them is the honest sentence in the whole post. Capital can move. Your town cannot. The threat of leaving is how a town gets pushed into accepting a deal it would never pick on its own.
He brought up China, so let’s go there. In China, a data center inside a reclaimed water service area has to cool with reclaimed water instead of drinking water. And a 2025 rule from the National Development and Reform Commission says new industrial load has to build new generating capacity to match it. You size the power supply to the thing you are plugging in, instead of dumping it onto a grid everybody else is already using. It settles something simple. The residents, the people, get first claim on the water and the power. People come first, and the state is the one that decides it. That’s what this is about. The United States hands that decision to capital, and capital gives the answer it always gives.
So why can’t the richest country on earth build clean power for its own people? Trump’s Energy Department used emergency powers to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan running, and renewed that order again on August 14. It used the same emergency powers to shut down 5 offshore wind projects that were already under construction. It killed the 4.9 billion dollar federal loan for a transmission line built to carry 5 gigawatts of wind and solar power out of Kansas. Think about what that means. A coal plant that needs a government order to stay alive is a coal plant that already lost on price. Cheap green power would wipe out billions of dollars in coal and gas assets that the ruling class still owns, and the capitalists don’t want to lose it. So the state keeps those broken assets breathing, and the working class covers the difference every month. Profit comes first and usefulness comes second. That is not incompetence. That is the system working the way it was built to work.
61% of Americans oppose a data center in their own community. Republicans and Democrats, they all oppose it. Governors from both parties have hit the brakes. But the President’s answer to that majority was to call them backward and poor, and tell them a foreign country is enjoying their resistance.
China is enjoying this. Not the data centers, and not the protests. What Beijing is watching is an American ruling class that cannot build infrastructure, cannot plan an energy system, cannot lower one household’s electric bill, and cannot think outside the framework that pays it. A class that can no longer produce anything for its own people has one product left. Blame another country.
Once again the US is doing things ass backwards and upside down- to protect capital and those who benefit most
Data Centers Tax Breaks: You might add that the billions offered to data centers by state and local governments, which are actually paid for by the taxpayers, is just another form of socialism. Ya know that S word the oligarchs throw around as evil and claim it's the same as communism. Socialism is only allowed for them. The major point for offering tax reduction incentives is to attract business to increase jobs and increase the tax base for the overall benefits of that community. The cost benefit is not there for data centers if the local or state government runs a 5 or 10 year analysis. Something they call a 5-year plan!
I seriously question the education level of these decision makers, not to mention the prime motivation for approving a decidedly financially and environmentally harmful contract impacting an entire community. I seriously question why the people who live in these communities allow their gov't officials to ruin their lives. It's like this is a country of children where the politicians are play-acting like adults with only a back pocket incentive.