The Complete Guide to Corn Belt Energy Bill Pay Options (2025 Update)

Regional economic development officials offered incentives that attracted warehouses, manufacturing plants, and healthcare startups, reviving the economy and generating jobs. By 2018, hundreds of these deals over the previous eight years had created some 150,000 jobs.

Central Ohio now hopes to repeat that success. Its betting big on “Silicon Heartland,” a high-tech innovation hub that proponents hope will be flush with high-paying jobs. Economic officials have dangled multimillion-dollar tax subsidy packages before some of the worlds biggest technology companies.

The resulting investment, Gov. Mike DeWine promised, “further cements Ohio as the heart of our nations technology and innovation.”

Mostly, theyre getting data centers. Central Ohio has become one of Americas hottest hubs for these computing warehouses, with companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, and QTS flocking there, lured largely by generous incentives.

A Business Insider analysis of construction permits, economic development deals, and company disclosures found that even the largest data centers generally employ fewer than 150 permanent workers, and some have as few as 25. Building those data centers also creates significant numbers of construction jobs, but those are short term, sometimes lasting less than a year — far shorter than the duration of the tax breaks the companies get, which often last a decade or longer.

That means the tax breaks given to developers can amount over time to more than $2 million for every permanent, full-time job at an operational data center, Business Insiders analysis found. Thats roughly eight times higher than the $262,000 average per job that watchdog group Good Jobs First found in 18 economic development deals worth at least $50 million awarded in 2023.

The number of jobs doesnt balance the cost, multiple economists and researchers who study tax subsidies told Business Insider — even factoring in the construction and other supporting roles that the tech industry uses to calculate its economic impact. Records show that the workforce on data center projects quickly tapers off, meaning industry estimates often significantly overstate long-term employment benefits.

The costs to the public dont end with tax subsidies. Data centers drive up electricity costs for other ratepayers as utility operators invest billions of dollars in new grid infrastructure to support escalating power demands. That has drawn opposition from other companies including retail giant Walmart, which has said that surging electricity bills are imperiling its expansion in states such as Ohio and Virginia.

“Each new data center built in Ohio spurs a significant boost in investment, revenue, and wages that flow to Ohio businesses and workers, stimulating the states economy,” Josh Levi, the president of the Data Center Coalition, an industry advocacy group, wrote in an August 2024 op-ed article published by Cleveland.com. In recent US congressional testimony, he cited an estimate that data centers in Central Ohio supported more than “10,000 construction jobs, 2,000 data center jobs, and hundreds of maintenance and retrofitting jobs last year.”

In 2021, for example, Google entered into a much-celebrated deal with Columbus to construct a data center campus. The city offered a 100% property tax abatement worth an estimated $54 million in tax savings over 15 years.

In exchange, the Google facility promised 20 full-time jobs at the data center, rising to about 40 jobs by 2047.

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Pricing the ‘Silicon Heartland’

Artificial intelligence is accelerating data center construction that already was growing quickly to power digital services from social media to medical care. In 2025 alone, Meta plans to spend at least $64 billion on facilities and equipment. Googles parent company, Alphabet, plans to spend $75 billion, and Microsoft said it would invest $80 billion.

Tech companies say their investments will supercharge local tax revenues and high-paying jobs will drive economic growth. Even with tax breaks, data centers contributed $162.7 billion in federal, state, and local tax revenue in 2023, according to a February 2025 PwC report prepared for the Data Center Coalition. The industry, the report said, supported 4.7 million jobs directly at data centers or indirectly through their supply chain.

Amazon, the biggest data center operator, calculates that its data centers each year have supported thousands of jobs, including 6,490 in Ohio and 20,700 in Virginia. Matt Hurst, a spokesperson for Amazon Web Services, Amazons cloud-computing arm, told Business Insider the company was “proud of the good jobs we create, for the trust local communities invest in us, and for the opportunity we have to invest in those communities.”

Meta says that its data center operations support 16,000 jobs and $1.2 billion in labor income annually, and that it has backed 440,000 construction jobs over the past decade. Google says its data centers supported 119,000 jobs and contributed $12.6 billion to US gross domestic product in 2023 across its supply chain, including construction. Microsofts website says its data centers generate “public infrastructure improvements and tax revenue that serve as a catalyst for enhancing the quality of life.”

“Our developments generate millions of dollars in tax revenue to support local priorities related to schools, roads, housing, and other critical needs, while also reducing the tax burden on residents,” a spokesperson for QTS, which is owned by the investment firm Blackstone, said in a statement.

A Blackstone spokesperson also highlighted the benefits of data center development and said the company was “proud that our investment in QTS provides the digital infrastructure critical to the future of our country and economy.”

Competition to score these promised benefits can be a race to the bottom, as developers pit state against state and city against city. New projects cluster in areas that offer the most competitive deals.

To investigate how these incentive deals play out, Business Insider identified areas of data center development and filed requests with all 50 states and Washington, DC, for the air permits that regulate backup generators at every data center. Business Insider compiled records for 1,240 data centers nationwide, the most definitive accounting to date, and requested records of data-center-related economic incentives from municipalities and states.

The largest data centers in Business Insiders analysis — the 322 massive facilities that we estimate consume 40 megawatts of electricity or more each — are heavily concentrated in a few places. Northern Virginia has 214, followed by Arizonas Maricopa County with 16, and Ohios Columbus region with 9.

Thirty-seven states have tax incentive programs for data center investments. Most exempt developers from sales and use taxes on building materials, machinery, or equipment — resulting in big hits to state coffers. In Virginia, 56 data center projects cost $928 million in abated state sales tax in the 2023 fiscal year alone. Disclosures in Ohio estimate it forfeited nearly $360 million in data-center-related state tax revenue from the 2022 through 2024 fiscal years.

Mason Waldvogel, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Development, called the tax incentive program “a strategic tool used to create long-term economic growth by attracting high-value, capital-intensive projects.” A spokesperson for the Data Center Coalition said state tax exemptions for data centers were consistent with programs for other capital-intensive industries.

Cities also offer incentives, including breaks on property taxes and reimbursements for building fees. Arizona cities largely dont give property tax abatements but allow the use of precious water resources. Virginia grants access to enormous amounts of electricity and critical infrastructure but requires data centers to pay local property taxes. Indeed, Northern Virginia cities generate up to 31% of their total tax revenue from data centers, funding fire departments, affordable housing, and other services.

In the Columbus region, Business Insider located 19 data center-related deals that, together with state-level abatements, amounted to at least $750 million in forfeited tax revenue for 770 full-time jobs employed at data centers as of December 2023.

The jobs generally pay well, averaging $100,000 a year in Central Ohio, according to company disclosures. At the Google data center in Columbus, salaries range from $74,000 for a data center technician to $162,000 for an operations manager.

Amazon tops the list with seven deals. In one, the northwest Columbus suburb of Dublin agreed to sell Amazon 66 acres, which the city valued at $100,000 an acre, for $1 in total. Amazon agreed to pay the farmers previously leasing the land up to $40,000 total to abandon their soybeans and corn crops and terminate the lease. It told Dublin it expected to hire 25 full-time workers by the end of 2018, a nonbinding projection. In contrast, Amazon projected that it would hire 1,000 Ohioans at a new fulfillment center in Canton several years later — without taking any local property tax abatements or state incentives.

Amazons Hurst said the company works hard to create every job it projects.

The deals keep coming, from Batavia, New York, to Meridian, Mississippi.

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Nathan M. Jensen, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies regional tax incentive programs, said cities are better off sitting these deals out. Communities throw everything they can at tech companies, yet when the costs of lost tax revenue and escalating electricity prices are factored against what the communities get back in jobs, revenue, and prestige, “theres just no evidence that youre going to benefit from that data center,” he said.

If data center developers threaten to walk from cities that refuse to compete for these deals, Jensens advice is blunt: “Let em walk.”

Jensen said data centers were shaping up like professional sports stadiums, where cities give millions in tax revenue savings in exchange for temporary construction jobs and minimal economic impact. Construction of data centers generally lasts one to two years, or sometimes longer, and many construction jobs run for only part of that period.

In Virginia, one analysis found that about 80% of jobs from data centers created over a recent two-year period were in construction. And the numbers of such data-center-supported jobs cited in this years Data Center Coalition report may be misleading, multiple economists and researchers who study incentives told Business Insider.

Timothy Bartik, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a not-for-profit organization focused on reducing unemployment, said his own study suggests job numbers in the high-tech sector, like data centers, could be less than half of industry estimates.

Microsoft estimated last year that a campus with six data centers that it is building outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, would have 1,005 jobs at peak construction, falling to 335 full-time employees and contractors by the end of next year.

At a construction project in Columbus for the data center operator Cologix, one contractor, Baker Concrete Construction, had 63 people on payroll. Those jobs lasted an average of 6 ½ weeks. Cologix said that overall the site had an average of 146 workers during the projects construction.

Incentive packages often spell out how many jobs a company commits to creating in exchange for its tax breaks. Data center companies generally commit to deliver only the jobs inside their facilities in exchange for their tax breaks — not the construction and other ancillary jobs they say their projects create. Based on what is actually promised in such deals, those jobs can be expensive for local governments. Business Insider identified five deals in Ohio where, as of December 2023, each long-term job in the data centers cost over $1 million in abated taxes over the life of the deal.

An Amazon data center in Hilliard had saved at least $195 million in state and local taxes as of December 2023, according to annual disclosures, driving the price of each job to over $1 million in abated taxes. New Albany, Ohio, garnered 98 jobs at a Meta data center, but forfeited $189.6 million in state and local taxes as of the end of 2023 — making each job worth about $1.9 million in foregone tax revenue.

“We disagree with this way of thinking about the benefits we bring to communities,” Amazons Hurst said, adding that it benefits communities in ways beyond direct job creation, such as spending with local businesses and funding job-training efforts. A Meta spokesperson said it helps communities where it operates through grants and partnerships.

The Data Center Coalition spokesperson said that focusing on jobs inside data centers understates the impact on service providers and suppliers, such as electricians, HVAC manufacturers, and portable sanitation companies.

Companies are still required to make yearly payments to the cities in lieu of property taxes to help ensure minimum contributions to the communities, which Business Insider incorporated into our cost-per-job calculations. Meta, for example, paid $21.8 million in total to New Albany as of December 2022. A spokesperson for New Albany said the payments ensure “data centers contribute meaningfully to the community, even with tax abatements in place.”

And tech companies often sweeten the deals by promising to invest in education programs to upskill local workers. Amazon, for example, donated $25,000 and some equipment two years ago to the Tolles Career & Technical Center in Plain City, Ohio, to support the schools IT and cybersecurity training programs, which include a four-week training program for entry-level data center workers. At the nearby Columbus State Community College, the company pledged $50,000 in scholarships for a new data center technician certificate program.

The ultrapowerful computer chips crammed into data centers consume enormous amounts of power. A 2024 Department of Energy report estimates their electricity use, driven by the AI boom, could soon command as much as 12% of total US electricity use, from just over 4% in 2023.

Data centers are getting breaks on that, too — which residents and other businesses are helping pay for.

From 2020 through last year, Ohio data centers load on the grid rose sixfold. By 2030, American Electric Power Ohio, the states largest electricity provider, expects to grow by another 700% to reach 5,000 megawatts, enough to power at least 2 million homes.

If all hookup requests across more than 90 planned data center sites in Ohio are approved, AEP Ohio told regulators, demand could skyrocket to over 30,000 megawatts.

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