Ohio, one of the nation’s data center destination hot spots, is suspending a tax break that has been critical to its competition with other states to attract the massive new facilities that power and train artificial intelligence chatbots.
The move Wednesday by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine comes as tax breaks for energy-hungry AI data centers are increasingly playing a role in state budgets and the industry is under pressure to pay the full costs of the vast network of its computing warehouses needed to power AI.
The size of Ohio’s tax break skyrocketed, dwarfing previous projections, as opposition to data centers is sweeping through cities, suburbs and towns there and prompting lawmakers to form a committee to study the impact.
In the meantime, residents are trying to bypass the GOP-controlled Legislature and get a referendum on November’s midterm election ballot that’s designed to permanently ban hyperscale data centers, likely the strictest such statewide ban under consideration in the U.S.
DeWine’s office cited the rising utilization of the tax break and the state Legislature’s new research undertaking to declare a “pause” in granting it to new applicants.
“The governor felt it was the right time to let the citizens know, let businesses know that we’re going to pause on new offers of this tax incentive while that process plays out,” DeWine’s spokesperson, Dan Tierney, said Thursday.
Love how this thing that people universally do not want is hoovering up money like nothing we’ve seen before, while simultaneously consuming resources we need on an unprecedented scale…as healthcare, education, and infrastructure – all things in serious need of funding – continue to wither into dreams that will never come true for the people all this money is coming from. The very same money that could fix all these things. The annual budget the US has to throw around could easily make this one of the most advanced/cutting edge civilizations in the world but instead it’s attempting to be the second-biggest surveillance state in the world and enrich a bunch of pedophiles in the process. Just rock-solid work we get done here in this place.
I feel bad for the generations that will be inheriting this shit show.
Every bubble gets bigger because the system is unsustainable. Every crisis the government has acted to keep the crash from being too big, but eventually it will be too big to stop