Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, America’s most well-known brands and most prosperous firms, are demanding that states and localities provide them ever-larger economic development subsidies to support their data centers. Last year these five tech giants reported nearly $120 billion in pre-tax profits, and yet they told states and localities they needed financial help to build new data centers, structures essential to their business operations. Their efforts resulted in more than $2 billion in public support to build 11 new data centers. The facilities would create 1,174 long term jobs, amounting to an enormous per job subsidy of $1.95 million, according to Money Lost to the Cloud, a new report from Good Jobs First which I authored.
