Fit Precast, an industrial concrete company, is investing $102 million on a new facility in Gastonia, North Carolina, to 125 new jobs For workers across the region. Pharmaceutical giant Becton Dickinson is investing $110 million in manufacturing expansion in Columbus Ohio – 120 jobs. A new automotive venture is investing $120 million in a new plant in Orangeburg, South Carolina about 400 jobs.
Now meet Arc Data Centers, the Iowa firm that is building a $136 million campus expansion in Northeast Ohio. The cost of the project exceeds any of the above, yet its final task count will not be in the hundreds or even dozens: instead, it is exactly ten.
The Arch project was one of eight developments that were rewarded multimillion-dollar tax breaks by the Ohio Tax Credit Authority – not on its own initiative, but on the recommendation of JobsOhio, an economic development nonprofit in the state.
The data center company’s tax break was the largest of the eight, according to cleveland.comAnd constitutes a ten-year sales discount at 50 percent, covering most newly purchased equipment. Overall, this represents a state tax rebate of $4.5 million, cleveland Report – to bring ten jobs for workers who, presumably, will still have to pay state income taxes.
With ten jobs being created in total, it remains to be seen what else Arch plans to bring to the state. With nearly 200 data facilities, the state is already calling Ohio home Immersing yourself in AI infrastructure projectswhich exhausts municipal governments and is threatening to create a statewide energy crisis.
And unlike companies like Fit Precast, whose jobs in sustainable manufacturing will provide steady work for the community for years, data center jobs are extremely uncertain. They are typically staffed by a skeleton crew of low-paid security guards and IT workers, at a huge indirect cost to taxpayers.
as labor researcher Greg LeRoy told mother jones In a recent interview, the data center tycoon has received more than $1 million in state subsidies for every permanent job he has created so far.
And although it’s not Ohio, an analysis by the nonprofit Food and Water Watch found that the total capital investment to open a full-time data center job in Virginia was nearly 100 times more Compared to similar jobs in other industries.
Given that data centers are extremely unpopular with the public and a terrible investment overall, it remains to be seen how a project creating ten jobs will convince Ohio to bend over backwards for it – and how long it will take for taxpayers to demand change.
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