Senate report says some data centre firms mislead on jobs, costs

According to the report, several of the companies would not tell investigators how many permanent staff their sites employ, even as construction jobs anchor their requests for incentives. Those that answered gave a ratio near one worker per megawatt. At that rate, a 100-megawatt campus using the power of 100,000 homes runs on about 100 people. The investigators name sales-tax exemptions on computer equipment as the most lucrative incentives, ahead of the better-known property-tax breaks, with GPUs estimated at 39 per cent of spending on an average one-gigawatt site, Tom’s Hardware notes.

None of the seven would accept paying for power plants or lines built only because of their demand, the report says. It also finds that Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft all routinely sought non-disclosure agreements while developing sites. Microsoft told investigators it will stop seeking them with local governments, and Amazon has announced a similar policy; Google and Meta made no such commitment, TIME reports.

Local tax breaks and power prices are part of the cost of AI compute, and three senators now want those terms in public.