Data Centers are manufacturing facilities
Their strategically-marketed rollout as “technology in a building” or “data storage facilities” is fundamentally misleading. Data centers simply process a raw material—data—into a product that can be used to perform services which rely on that data.
In the case of user interface applications like ChatGPT or Claude, data centers process answers to user questions and prompts.
More commonly, these data centers suck in large data sets, and process those for use in advertising campaigns, marketing strategies and detailed profiles on each of us, for the specific purpose of selling us products, or manipulating us into desired outcomes for political, social, or commercial special interest groups.
Data comes into these centers in a measurable, standardized unit, and exits as a finished, polished product that has a real, tangible value to its owner. Developers and tech companies will complicate and conceal this fact. But the quantifiable products of data center exist, and can therefore be taxed as commercial revenue.
Data centers cannot be allowed to become the next in a long line of regretful speculative investments.
It is imperative that local, state, and federal officials be educated on the real risks of building infrastructure which offers no public good, or even a real tangible economic purpose, and which leaves our poorest communities weighted down by liabilities that will burden them for generations.
The very purpose of our system of government— in which power is derived directly from the people—is to preserve our lives, our liberty, and our dignity.
It is time for our voices to be heard.