Comments Guidelines

All comments are pre-moderated. No spam, slurs, personal attacks, or foul language will be allowed.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

New study casts more doubt on data center subsidies

A new report by Good Jobs First confirms what has been long-suspected: Data center megadeals of over $50 million in subsidies create very few jobs at a cost per job that easily exceeds $1 million. Indeed, the average for 11 megadeals going to tech giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft came to $1.8 million ($2.1 billion/1174) nominal cost per job.

As I have discussed before, such a figure far exceeds what a typical automobile assembly plant will receive, even though the latter creates far more, and better-paying, jobs than server farms do. An auto facility will receive something around $150-200,000 per job, and it will bring along suppliers to boot (though, unfortunately, sometimes the suppliers will also receive incentives).

The new study finds that by far the most important site location consideration is the cost of electricity and, increasingly, whether the electricity is generated by renewable sources like wind or solar. Thus, many of the biggest data centers are located in states like North Carolina (cheap coal-fired plants), Oregon and Washington (cheap hydropower). States with cheap electricity do not need massive subsidies, but they provide them, anyway.

At least, they usually do. As I have related before, American Express in 2010 announced a $400 million data center in North Carolina, without incentives. But fear not, Amex had not forgotten about using the site selection process as a rent-seeking opportunity. The reason it did not seek incentives, as far as anyone can tell (don't forget about the inherent information asymmetry here), is that the company knew it was going to close a 1900-job call center in Greensboro, which would trigger clawbacks on the data center if it received subsidies for it. So in that case North Carolina gave no incentives for the server farm.

Not only that, Google knows how to build and expand data centers without incentives. Of course, that's in Europe. The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency confirmed for me that it gave no subsidies to Google for a $773 million, 150-job center opening in Groningen province next year. I was unable to get affirmative confirmation on projects in Ireland, Finland, and Belgium, but none of them show up in the EU's Competition Directorate case database, so presumably they did not receive incentives either.

 The study concludes with sensible recommendations: Transparency where it doesn't exist, capping incentives at $50,000 per job, and knowing when to get out of subsidy auctions for these projects. Maybe simpler still, I would suggest that economic development officials just say no.