Fit Precast, an industrial concrete company, is dropping $102 million on a new facility in Gastonia, North Carolina, creating 125 new jobs for workers throughout the area. Pharmaceutical giant Becton Dickinson is putting $110 million into a manufacturing expansion in Columbus Ohio — 120 jobs. A new automotive venture in Orangeburg, South Carolina is investing $120 million into a new plant, bringing in nearly 400 jobs.
Now meet Ark Data Centers, an Iowa firm building a $136 million campus expansion in Northeastern Ohio. The project costs more than any of the above, yet its final job count won’t be in the hundreds, or even the dozens: instead, it’s exactly ten.
The Ark project was one of eight developments rewarded with a multimillion-dollar tax break by the Ohio Tax Credit Authority — not on its own initiative, but on the recommendation of JobsOhio, an economic development nonprofit in the state.
The data center company’s tax break was the largest of the eight, according to Cleveland.com, and constitutes a ten-year sales exemption at 50 percent, mostly covering newly purchased equipment. Altogether, it represents a state tax exemption of $4.5 million, Cleveland reports — to bring in a whopping ten jobs for workers who will, presumably, still have to pay state income taxes.
With that miserly ten total jobs being created, it remains to be seen what else Ark plans on bringing into the state. With some 200 data facilities already calling Ohio home, the state is already drowning in AI infrastructure projects, which exhaust municipal governments and are threatening to create a statewide energy crisis.
And unlike companies like Fit Precast, whose jobs in durable manufacturing will likely provide stable work for the community for years, data center jobs are notoriously precarious. They’re typically staffed by a skeleton crew of low-wage security guards and IT workers, at a huge indirect cost to taxpayers.
As labor researcher Greg LeRoy told Mother Jones in a recent interview, data center tycoons have so far pocketed over $1 million in state subsidies for every permanent job they created.
And though it isn’t Ohio, an analysis from nonprofit Food & Water Watch found that the total capital investment it took to open one full-time data center job in Virginia was almost 100 times more than similar jobs in other industries.
Given that data centers are wildly unpopular with the public and a horrible investment overall, it remains to be seen how a project creating ten jobs convinced Ohio to bend over backward for it — and how long it will take taxpayers to demand a change.
More on data centers: Farmer Hailed as Hero for Rejecting Huge Payment to Turn His Land Into a Giant Data Center
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