If the past few months in the Coachella Valley felt like an unusually intense local fight over data centers, zoom out for a minute. It isn’t just us. Across the country, cities and states are trying to answer the same question: what does a community actually get in return for hosting the enormous infrastructure the AI boom requires? And this month that debate got very personal.
On September 1, voters in Independence, Missouri, recalled a city councilman over a data-center deal. John Perkins was removed with 68.05 percent voting for his recall, according to KCTV5 — the first successful council recall in the city’s history. Perkins was one of five councilmembers who in March voted 5–2 to approve incentives for a Nebius AI data center, a $150 billion project on 400 acres. KCUR reported the package waives roughly 90 percent of property taxes for 20 years, more than $6 billion in all, with the company paying about $651 million in fees instead. This wasn’t a councilman losing his seat in the ordinary course of an election. Residents organized a recall around the vote itself, and two other members who supported the deal had already lost their seats in April.
One day earlier, President Trump had stepped into the debate from the other side. In a post on August 31 he wrote that “the only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” and that communities that accept them get “far lower taxes and jobs all over the place.”
So which is it? The numbers say the answer is more complicated than either slogan.
Start with the tax breaks
Thirty-eight states now offer dedicated tax incentives for data centers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. They typically exempt servers and construction materials from sales tax; fourteen states extend the break to electricity, and eleven offer property-tax relief. Eighteen states set a term, most often ten years and as long as fifty.
Virginia is the best real-world test, because it has the largest data-center market in the country. Its nonpartisan Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission found, in a 2024 analysis, that for every dollar the state abated through its sales-tax exemption it got back about 48 cents in new state tax revenue. Measured strictly as a state incentive, the exemption did not pay for itself.
Go down one level of government and the numbers look very different. Loudoun County says data centers generated about $1.2 billion in real and personal property taxes in fiscal 2026 — 39 percent of the county’s budget — and that the revenue let it cut its real-property tax rate from $1.145 per $100 of assessed value in 2016 to $0.805 in 2026, though rising assessments mean individual bills can still go up.
That distinction is the story. A data center can be a poor deal for a state treasury and, at the same time, an unusually valuable tax base for a county — if the equipment, buildings and land stay taxable. The details of the deal matter.
What about the jobs?
Only 23 of the 38 states require a specific number of new jobs, NCSL found, with thresholds from five (Maryland) to 100 (Massachusetts). Virginia’s auditors found a typical 250,000-square-foot data center employs roughly 50 full-time workers, about half of them contractors. During construction the same project can have roughly 1,500 workers on site at peak, for a build that usually runs 12 to 18 months.
So data centers create jobs. But construction jobs and permanent operating jobs are two different promises, and some deals show how wide the gap can be. A CNBC investigation last year found a Microsoft data center in Illinois received more than $38 million in sales-tax exemptions and created 20 permanent jobs. In New York, the Rockland County Industrial Development Agency approved nearly $77 million in tax breaks for an expansion of JPMorgan Chase’s existing Orangeburg data center that projected one additional permanent job, New York Focus reported. The agency argued the expansion would produce more than $100 million in local benefit and more than 1,400 construction jobs; the permanent-job commitment attached to it was still one.
“Billions of dollars of investment” does not answer the local question. Investment is not the same thing as benefit.
Bring it home
That national context makes Coachella look much less isolated. Earlier this year the proposed Coachella Valley Technology Campus envisioned six data-center buildings on 240 acres near Avenue 52 and Fillmore Street, drawing 270 to 300 megawatts. After months of public scrutiny the City Council terminated its agreement with Stronghold Power Systems and imposed a moratorium in June. On August 26 it adopted a permanent prohibition on large-scale data centers, with exceptions for small-scale server, security, electricity and telecommunications uses — making Coachella the second California city to ban them, after Monterey Park’s voters did so in June.
Coachella is not alone in the valley. Indio extended its moratorium in July and is drafting a permanent ban. Desert Hot Springs extended its moratorium to two years. And on the same night Coachella passed its ban, Palm Springs unanimously approved a 45-day pause, through October 10, while it works out how data centers should or shouldn’t fit its zoning code. These cities haven’t reached the same conclusion. They are asking the same questions.
Then there’s Adelanto
Adelanto is different, and the difference matters. There is no data-center project proposed there — “there are currently no proposals for data centers,” Jim Hersh of the city’s planning division told KVCR. What the city proposed was a text-only zoning amendment, ZTA 26-01, that would let three industrial zones consider data centers, energy facilities, battery storage and semiconductor and drone manufacturing through a future permit process.
More than 200 people attended the Planning Commission’s August 19 hearing and about a third spoke, nearly all against, most of them about water. On August 25 the commission voted 3–2 against recommending the amendment. That vote was advisory; the City Council has the final say. The fallout didn’t stop there. At the council’s August 26 meeting, Mayor Gabriel Reyes said he was “extremely disappointed with how the business was handled” at the hearing, asked that the removal of Planning Commission Chair Chris Waggener be placed on the next agenda, and asked City Manager Jesse Flores to pause the amendment until the city could do more community engagement. Councilmember Stevevonna Evans went further, asking the council to consider removing Waggener from the commission altogether.
The council met again on September 9. As of publication the city had not posted a record of that meeting, and the amendment remained paused under the mayor’s August 26 request. The council’s next regular meeting is September 23.
So the conversation is not disappearing. It’s moving.
Six questions before “for or against”
Nationally and locally, the most useful first question for residents is not whether they are for data centers or against them. It comes too early. A community should first be able to answer:
- How many permanent local jobs are contractually guaranteed, and at what wages?
- What tax revenue will actually reach the city, county and schools after every exemption is counted?
- Who pays for the new generation, transmission and substations the project needs?
- How much water will the specific cooling design use, especially in the hottest months?
- What is enforceable if projections change, and are there clawbacks if promised jobs or investment don’t materialize?
- What does the project look like financially under a conservative scenario, not the developer’s best case?
Those questions don’t produce a yes and they don’t produce a no. They produce a deal the public can evaluate. Some communities have made substantial money from data centers. Some states have given away enormous amounts of revenue to attract them. Construction employment can be significant; permanent employment is generally much smaller. And the consequences of power, water, land and tax decisions outlast the officials — and the technology — of the day.
As the Inland Empire decides where it stands, the job isn’t to pick a side quickly. It’s to know exactly what is being said yes, or no, to. That conversation is happening all over the country. We are very much not alone.