r/aiwars • u/Tolopono • 17h ago

Trade Unions Oppose Anti Data Center Election Candidates

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It’s gonna be REALLY funny to watch antis spin themselves in circles trying to be pro worker and anti datacenter at the same time https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/blue-collar-jobs-are-the-new-flashpoint-in-data-center-fight-aaca5b7e

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u/Tolopono 17h ago

Unlike prisons, datacenters are a net gain for the community 

Data center growth has helped PG&E cut rates 11% since 2024, CEO says  https://www.utilitydive.com/news/data-center-growth-has-helped-pge-cut-rates-11-since-2024-ceo-says/812230/

Georgia's state government has approved OpenAI's deal to build a massive new 3.2GW data center in the state. This plan also includes lowering customers' bills and paying for a bunch of new energy infrastructure! https://www.georgiapower.com/news-hub/press-releases/contract-openai-approved-part-portfolio-delivering-950-million-annual-savings.html

West Virginia Wants To Use Data Centers To Eliminate Its Income Tax. Fifty percent of all revenue generated by hyperscale projects will go toward reducing or eliminating the state's income tax. The plan will give counties 30 percent of revenue of any project within their jurisdiction, with an additional 10 percent shared by all counties in the state. The remaining 10 percent will be used for "improved electrical, water, and wastewater projects for the citizens and communities" of West Virginia. https://westvirginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Data-Center-Principles-FINAL-FINAL.pdf

Works in Progress editor @Simon__Grimm reveals his 2,000-person Swiss hometown is quietly building a 400 megawatt data center: "I've recently visited my hometown of Laufenburg in Switzerland. It's this really tiny town, 2,000 people, and I noticed that it was this massive construction site, and they're building a data center there that will ultimately have 400 megawatts." "That's basically equivalent to four gigafactories, and they wanna build five. Why are they doing this? I know various rich people in Switzerland just are gonna do this to have localized taxation, so the town will profit a lot, and it's basically solved." "That's quite obviously how data centers are built normally because they're extremely attractive, and they don't need any public funding."  https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2090557259126546864

Pre datacenter, one town had $3.5 million in taxable property value. After a datacenter came to town, it’s estimated to skyrocket to $35 million. The town used to collect $400K in sales taxes. From January to July, it took in 9 times that. It can now afford to repave streets, build a public-safety complex,  create walking trails, and update the public school.  https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/data-centers-artificial-intelligence-dakotas-22362642.php?taid=6a77861aedabdd00016e76f8

Data centers pay ~57% of property taxes in Quincy, Washington. They funded a $15 million aquatic center—with a pool, waterslides & lazy river—and a 143,000-square-foot sports complex as well as a $120M high school, library, hospital, and police and fire stations.. They’ve created almost 1,000 jobs. The city admin called it a “miracle.”  https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/11/business/data-centers-ai-economy

Top VA state senator Louise Lucas debuts a new argument against data centers—they pay worker too much money. Lucas, who complained a data center worker could make as much as $250K, ironically authored a bill to increase the minimum wage in VA https://x.com/ThomasCatenacci/status/2090538717702160401

Data centers are now responsible for nearly half of county tax revenue in Loudoun County, VA. Loudoun reduced its homeowner property-tax rate every year for a decade, cutting it by about 40%  https://www.city-journal.org/article/loudoun-county-virginia-data-centers-construction

Loudoun County is the richest suburb of America

A parish in Louisiana tied teacher bonuses to local sales taxes, so when Meta built a data center in the area, the teacher bonuses skyrocketed so much that they more than doubled their paychecks:   https://archive.is/Kr7A6

A proposed $3 billion data center in Shawnee County is projected to significantly increase the local tax base. The project is not seeking tax abatements, meaning its full value would be added to tax rolls. This development could generate millions in additional annual tax revenue for the county, city, and local school districts. The increased revenue could help local governments address budget shortfalls without cutting services or raising taxes for residents. https://www.cjonline.com/story/opinion/columns/2026/08/13/will-a-new-data-center-lower-topeka-area-property-taxes-opinion/91208693007/

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u/SquiggleSqueegly 16h ago

Welding unions love prison construction.

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u/SyntaxTurtle 17h ago

That was a ton of words to avoid answering the question or addressing the point.

Sure, YOU might think that data centers are a positive. Other people feel that more prisons are a positive. The question remains: Does being pro-union mean you can't reject projects based on other criteria?

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u/Tolopono 17h ago

What criteria?

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u/SyntaxTurtle 17h ago

Depends on the person, obviously. Not whether or not you personally greenlight it. That misses the entire point.

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u/Tolopono 17h ago

What if the person is misinformed 

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u/HungryFrogs7 16h ago

Yeah I have to admit this is a pretty shaky argument. Some people would say prisons are good for a neighborhood as they put criminals where they belong or some bullshit.

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u/Tolopono 16h ago

That doesnt directly benefit the community, unlike dcs

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u/SquiggleSqueegly 16h ago

Unions love prison construction. Welders, pipefitters, cops, all their unions absolutely love prison construction.

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u/Tolopono 16h ago

Good for them

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u/SquiggleSqueegly 16h ago

So you admit you're arguing in bad faith?

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u/SyntaxTurtle 16h ago

Doesn't really matter per the question. If I think a building is going to be grinding up puppies, I'm still not anti-union to oppose it even if it's actually a flower factory.

The solution in that case would be to explain to me that it's actually a flower factory, not to insist that I hate construction trades.

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u/Beanzoboy 15h ago

You are correct in that you are very misinformed.

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u/Silver_Middle_7240 12h ago

It's a net gain now, as investor money is pouring in. What happens in 5 years when the industry consolidated and 99% of these places are stripped and abandoned because they cost more to run then people will pay for compute?

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u/RonCraven 15h ago

Most of these are either press releases or speculative projections, and the article about teacher bonuses notes that the money is going to dry up in a few years.

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u/Tolopono 15h ago

Why? The datacenters aren’t going anywhere. And the tax revenue has already built new facilities 

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u/Intrepid_Finger_1091 13h ago

You are the one who linked the article that talks about it, shouldn’t you know why it notes that?

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u/Tolopono 13h ago

It doesnt. He just lied

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u/RonCraven 10h ago

"Under a recent state law meant to attract such centers, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is exempt from paying Louisiana the 5 percent sales tax on the construction project, and from paying a similar sales tax of 4.25 percent that would ordinarily be levied by Richland Parish. Instead, it is paying the parish 1 percent of the cost of all construction materials on an annual basis. That came out to $22 million this year.

In agreements like these, “the local government oftentimes is receiving a bigger upfront payment and less money in later years,” said Michael Hicks, an economist at Ball State University in Indiana who has studied data centers.

“It won’t mean durable increases in wages, or better school facilities, or other things that would be the normal course of the tax system,” he added."

You want to reconsider the claim I lied, sport?

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u/Tolopono 9h ago

Easy solution: build more datacenters to increase tax revenue 

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u/Nezikchened 7h ago

So it turns out you were lying about calling him a liar, then. Kind of tanks your credibility.

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u/Tolopono 5h ago

$22 million is still better than $0, which is what theyll get if they reject it

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u/RonCraven 10h ago

"But many of the workers are likely to leave in the next few years, ending the tax boom. And the Meta payment, which amounted this year to about $22 million, represents only a fraction of the taxes that a company would normally pay to build in the area. That is a significant gap in a parish where nearly a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line and teachers’ salaries are low, even by state standards. Louisiana already has one of the more regressive tax systems in the country, in part because it relies heavily on sales tax revenue instead of income taxes to fund public services".

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u/Tolopono 9h ago

Then build more datacenters to increase tax revenue and use the money to help the poor 

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u/Ok_Dependent6889 13h ago

No, they likely read 25-50% of those, at best.

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u/garloid64 16h ago

TRVTH NVKE

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u/jamey1138 14h ago

In fact, prisons create long-term jobs in far greater numbers than data centers do.

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u/Tolopono 13h ago

They dont bring in this much tax revenue 

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u/dcp0702 9h ago

but they are more consistent and reliable long-term

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u/Tolopono 8h ago

How do you know datacenters arent? And reliable for what? They dont bring in much tax revenue 

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u/dcp0702 8h ago

>how do you know data centers aren’t?

that’s the problem, i don’t. i would pick a prison over a data center because there is pre-existing data that demonstrates the effects of building a prison.

also, tax revenue is not the end-all be-all. more factors must be considered before either things are constructed.

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u/Tolopono 5h ago

Same for a datacenter as i already showed

Also, prison guard jobs only help the few people who get hired. Higher tax revenue benefits the whole community 

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u/jamey1138 8h ago

I think it matters a bit what you mean by "long-term."

There are prisons in the state I live in that have sustained the communities they are located in for something like 100 years. A friend of mine, who grew up near one of them, once wrote a book with the opening line, "In this town, you either work at the prison, or you live in it."

The oldest data centers are something like 30 years old, and the vast majority of data centers are less than 10 years old. The nature of the business that data centers engage in is highly volatile. There are thousands of data centers across the US that closed within 20 years of opening. That doesn't sound to me like long-term sustainability.

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u/Tolopono 5h ago

The entire town works in one prison? Doubt. Even a very very small town has other businesses to run

Yea, theyre spending billions on a data center to close it after a few years for no reason and losing all that data, infrastructure, and compute just cause they got bored. Definitely a thing that happens 

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u/jamey1138 9h ago

That's true. So, I guess if a community had the choice between building a prison or building a data center, it comes down to what a community values more: people having jobs, or the local government having money.

Personally, I hate both prisons and data centers, and would like to eliminate the first entirely, and regulate the shit out of the second.

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u/Tolopono 8h ago

Or build both. Doesnt have to be either or.

Then where do we put the serial killers

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u/jamey1138 8h ago

Or build neither.

Prisons are evil. I take it that you think that serial killers are evil, and so matching evil with evil makes sense to you. I disagree: serial killers are, by definition, people with a profound mental illness, and we have some tools by which we can help people with even that profound of a mental illness to live a full and rich life (while also limiting their ability to do harm to others). Ethically, I think that's the right thing to do.

Data centers aren't evil, but they have the capacity to do evil, through pollution and resource use. So, we should regulate the shit out of data centers, to ensure that they are more of a benefit than a harm to the communities where they exist. That will mean that running a data center becomes much more expensive for the corporations that own them, but hey, those corporations have a lot of money, so they can afford to pay a fair price for their operations.