Once Wary of Facebook and Apple, a Mill Town Tells Them to Keep Expanding
- 6 years ago
Once Wary of Facebook and Apple, a Mill Town Tells Them to Keep Expanding
“The market is very big because the demand is huge,” said Rob Johnson, chief executive of Vertiv, a $4 billion global technology company in Columbus, Ohio,
that designs, builds and supplies equipment to data centers.
Iowa last year awarded Apple $208 million in tax breaks to build a $1.3 billion center in rural Waukee that would employ 50 people.
“The big tech companies are getting huge tax breaks to build things they would build anyway,”
said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a research group in Washington.
A study in 2017 by CBRE Research found that certain metropolitan regions — Chicago, Detroit, New Jersey, New York, Northern Virginia
and Silicon Valley — were the most active areas for data center construction in the United States.
Nearby, Apple built its own $988 million, 660,000-square-foot data center, which the company will soon expand to one million square feet.
Property tax breaks that Oregon and other states use to lure data centers also are comparable.
“The market is very big because the demand is huge,” said Rob Johnson, chief executive of Vertiv, a $4 billion global technology company in Columbus, Ohio,
that designs, builds and supplies equipment to data centers.
Iowa last year awarded Apple $208 million in tax breaks to build a $1.3 billion center in rural Waukee that would employ 50 people.
“The big tech companies are getting huge tax breaks to build things they would build anyway,”
said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a research group in Washington.
A study in 2017 by CBRE Research found that certain metropolitan regions — Chicago, Detroit, New Jersey, New York, Northern Virginia
and Silicon Valley — were the most active areas for data center construction in the United States.
Nearby, Apple built its own $988 million, 660,000-square-foot data center, which the company will soon expand to one million square feet.
Property tax breaks that Oregon and other states use to lure data centers also are comparable.