Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year out of state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
Despite these generous subsidies, data center owners are legally allowed to shield many of their financial details from state oversight. They aren’t required to prove their ongoing eligibility for the tax exemptions unless they are audited by the state Department of Revenue. Lawmakers enacted sales and use tax breaks for data centers in 2010 and expanded them in 2015.
“At that time, no one could have predicted the explosive growth of data centers and how much energy they consumed,” Gov. Josh Stein told his Energy Policy Task Force, which met this week. “And because data centers at that point were a brand-new industry, they benefited from financial incentives to induce capital to invest. Those days are long gone.”
The problem is from a financial perspective, no one gives a shit beyond the next quarter or two. With a big enough company vs a small enough town it’s trivial to grease a few palms at the local level to play ball.