The average annual cost to the state at that time was projected to be $53.3 million between 2015 and 2019.
That doesn’t sound too earth-shattering.
More than 65% of the savings since 2018 have gone to Redmond-based Microsoft, a company with reported net earnings of $72.4 billion last year.
The company said in an emailed statement that the data center tax break from which it benefits “aligns with the intentions of lawmakers.”
I don’t know if the policy is actually a good idea, but I would imagine that Washington probably does benefit pretty substantially from having Microsoft around. I don’t think that Microsoft has to have datacenters in-state, but meh.
And speaking purely as someone in California who doesn’t particularly want to pay California datacenter rates, but likes datacenter service and access to services that make use of datacenters, if Washington wants to subsidize datacenters to try and get West Coast business, I’m not complaining.
Northern California has a reliable and extensive electrical grid. In the Santa Clara/San Jose data center cluster, power is provided by both Pacific Gas & Electric and Silicon Valley Power. These companies encourage using renewable power such as solar, wind, and the more exotic biomass solutions. However, these “green” power sources can often increase a data center’s total cost of ownership. The average power cost throughout Northern California is extremely high. These high costs often factor into the decisions for Northern California-based companies to co-locate in Portland, OR or Seattle, WA, where the typical power cost for data center users is approximately two times less.