Once Wary of Facebook and Apple, a Mill Town Tells Them to Keep Expanding<br />“The market is very big because the demand is huge,” said Rob Johnson, chief executive of Vertiv, a $4 billion global technology company in Columbus, Ohio,<br />that designs, builds and supplies equipment to data centers.<br />Iowa last year awarded Apple $208 million in tax breaks to build a $1.3 billion center in rural Waukee that would employ 50 people.<br />“The big tech companies are getting huge tax breaks to build things they would build anyway,”<br />said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a research group in Washington.<br />A study in 2017 by CBRE Research found that certain metropolitan regions — Chicago, Detroit, New Jersey, New York, Northern Virginia<br />and Silicon Valley — were the most active areas for data center construction in the United States.<br />Nearby, Apple built its own $988 million, 660,000-square-foot data center, which the company will soon expand to one million square feet.<br />Property tax breaks that Oregon and other states use to lure data centers also are comparable.
