What are we — which is to say society, humanity, the world, Nevada, etc. — getting for all that investment in data centers, apart from higher power bills, deepfakes, the elimination of jobs, and the dismantling of career ladders? (Getty Images)
Nevada should stop giving tax breaks to tech companies that build data centers in the state.
Nevada should instead charge hefty fees and impose robust community benefit conditions on tech companies that build data centers in the state.
Nevada should demand that the cost of electricity needed to run data centers will be paid exclusively by the tech companies on whose behalf the centers are operated.
Nevada should prohibit the companies and utilities from passing those electricity costs to other customers, especially residential ones.
Retroactively taking away tax breaks the state already granted would land Nevada in legal battles it would presumably lose.
But Nevada can halt giveaways to, and start demanding more from, companies seeking to build new data centers. All that would take is some tweaks to the state’s demeaning and self-deprecating “economic development” statutes.
Nevada should at least do that.
Corporations are always refining their mastery of categorizing, defining, and generally masquerading reported costs and revenues in ways that benefit them and stick it to everybody else.
So Nevada would have to fight tooth and nail to protect electricity consumers from getting saddled with skyrocketing power bills as a result of data center electricity demand.
Nevada should at least try.
Jobs, jobs, and snow jobs
Last year, when Google announced it was spending $400 million to build a second big data center in Nevada, bringing its total data center investments in recent years to north of $2 billion in the state, Gov. Joe Lombardo gushed “This investment further cements our state’s reputation as a new tech capital of the West.”
“Tech capital” sounds like something involving a rather large workforce of highly trained employees whose handsome incomes ripple throughout their communities in soothing waves of broadly shared prosperity.
But apart from the construction phase, the data center industry has, as one operator told the Wall Street Journal, “rightly earned a dismal reputation of creating the lowest number of jobs per square foot” of perhaps any indoor commercial enterprise.
Detailed data center, well, data on employment can be hard to come by. One tracking firm tallies 60 data centers (large and small) in Nevada, and according to an Axios analysis of Census data, last year there were about 3,000 data center workers in the state.
Those 3,000 jobs are the equivalent of less than two-tenths of 1% of the Nevada workforce.
That’s in line with the scale of the data center workforce nationally. Early this year the Census Bureau published a brief on national data center employment estimating the facilities employed a half-million workers in 2023, about three-tenths of 1% of the nation’s workforce at the time.
The global corporate, financial, and governmental rush to plant gazillion square-foot server farms on seemingly every sizable parcel of currently unoccupied dry land on the planet is (again, except for the short-term construction phase) not much of a job-creator.
Stop groveling
The largest single contributor to U.S. gross domestic product is consumer spending.
Or it was.
Through the first six months of this year, tech company investment to build and equip data centers contributed more to U.S. gross domestic product than consumer spending.
So what are we — which is to say society, humanity, the world, Nevada, etc. — getting for all that investment, apart from higher power bills, deepfakes, the elimination of jobs, and the dismantling of career ladders?
“AI is contributing to an incredibly wide range of potential longer-term economic outcomes,” reads a brief published by the Council on Foreign Relations early this month. “The proposed aftermath of broad AI adoption ranges from productivity booms that leave large swaths of the population out of work, to incremental innovation and role augmentation, to the stuff of dark sci-fi movies.”
But wait there’s more. The CFR report notes that Nvidia and the handful of tech giants who buy its chips to stuff into their data centers accounted for more than 80% of the S&P 500’s growth over the first half of 2025.
So that’s another thing we get for all that tech company investment: a bull market, and perhaps an irrationally exuberant one.
The CFR paper refrains from using the phrase “AI bubble” in reference to a potentially very overvalued stock market. By contrast, The Atlantic, one of oodles of publications that are not shying away from the b-word, notes that if there’s a bubble and it pops, “the silver lining would be that fears of sudden AI-driven job displacement are overblown.”
While everyone waits to see what the brave new world has in store for the people in it, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, along with less godly entities, plan to continue collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on more data centers.
Nevada’s data center presence could quadruple (and it probably will unless the boom goes bust first) and it still wouldn’t be a “tech capital.” Or even a data center capital. Compared to California, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, New York and several other mostly coastal states, Nevada is a U.S. data center bit player. AI is going to play out how AI is going to play out, no matter what Nevada thinks or says or does.
But Nevada could at least show some self respect and not grovel before tech companies along the way.