No one likes to see big companies avoid taxes.

But I don't see what other options are available for states to compete with each other if not through tax breaks.

Edit: I suppose if you ban tax breaks, if a state wants to be competitive, they still can but through modifying the tax code for everyone instead of giving certain people exceptions. That doesn't seem like a terrible alternative..

The other option is to not offer the tax breaks and if the company wants to build a data center, they also need to pay the taxes for it. If a state is dumb enough to offer tax breaks that's on them.

There's also not "competition" here. It isn't as if data centers have almost any positive local effects, beyond their property tax revenue. They have very few employees and if the property tax is cut they ultimately don't generate any income for the locality.

I can tell you that as someone living in Idaho, I see no differences when I work with the datacenters in Oregon, Washington, or Utah. I'm not benefited in the slightest by the few Idaho datacenters that I interact with currently.

It's the same argument that's been used to give sports stadiums sweetheart deals. These things have almost no local benefits and a lot of negative side effects with their presence.

> But I don't see what other options are available for states to compete with each other if not through tax breaks.

They should compete based on actual policy including tax policy. "Tax breaks" for specific projects are just unfair and a quick race to the bottom. Instead, areas should be required to treat all entities equally. Even tax breaks for specific industries like tv/film production are unfair but at least industry wide tax breaks treat individual entities more fairly.

If a state's taxes are too high to attract investment, then they should have to lower taxes for everyone (of the same type).

> exempt from state and local sales and use taxes on its data center equipment for the next 20 years

That said, the real issue IMO is that "use taxes" are just absurd to start with. Why should a random city/town be taxing products neither made nor sold in their jurisdiction. If anything, the sale of the datacenter product/services should be taxed but the external inputs "imported" from other states or countries is crazy to tax.

Again, I will die on the hill that a land value tax makes this all very simple. A LVT is the perfect strategy for extracting public value from data centers since electricity & water availability is a major input to a lands value.

The important consideration is whether states are competing for community benefits truly worth the bids made as tax breaks or whether the competition is just among politicians leveraging their personal control over tax breaks towards private benefit as power brokers.

> But I don't see what other options are available for states to compete with each other if not through tax breaks.

Federal ban on tax breaks for companies over a certain market cap?

Why can't they compete on "we have a good regulatory setup" or "we have good schools for your employees" or "we are a nice place to live"? Why compete on "we'll soak or own taxpayers more than the next state over so you can make even more obscene profits"?

The endgame of competing with lower taxes is handing out $99 in incentives to get $100 of mobile corporate spending in your area. The only winners are the corporations. There needs to be a collective spine.

building a ton of renewable power is a pretty good one

data centers could be a great thing for helping with the duck curve and the like, if they can throttle up and down based on energy cost

Infrastructure is a good one. Universities and high quality labor too.

Compete for what exactly, in this case?

compete for graft, kickbacks, energy parasites.