I did some analysis on this, although I’m not a finance expert. If you put $100M of GPUs in a Virginia datacenter then you might pay $2M per year in local taxes over the 5 year life of the equipment. (I don’t think tech companies tend to pay much corporate income tax.) If you took the same money and put up an office with 150 people making $150k/year, you’d pay less property tax but like $7M in income taxes, not to mention the other taxes those people pay as they go about their lives nearby, and the fact that their incomes are re-invested in the community. So companies shifting their spending from employees to GPUs seems to massively reduce their tax burden, and datacenters are a vastly worse deal than offices for whatever community ends up stuck with them.

It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.