Follow the money

Who actually benefits?

Incentives are not free money. They are a transfer. Put public benefit and public cost on the same page.

Estimate

01
Landowners
Sell or lease. Often the first and quietest winners.
02
Construction / electrical / mechanical
The large temporary check. Electricians especially.
03
Utilities
New revenue if tariffs recover costs. New risk if they do not.
04
Equipment makers
Transformers, CDUs, generators, UPS. Usually not local.
05
Chip companies
The GPUs. Allocation, not a local factory.
06
Operators / cloud
The rent or the captive workload.
07
Local government / schools
Property tax — unless an abatement says otherwise.
08
Workers
Construction first. A small ops crew later.
09
Investors
Capex is the product.
10
Customers
Cheaper or closer compute — sometimes. Ads, banks, hospitals, models.

Public benefit

Tax base, construction wages, fiber, a dedicated substation that can be reused, apprenticeships that actually enroll, research that actually runs.

Abatements, socialized wires, purple-pipe upgrades, noise, land that is no longer something else, a queue that moves a generation plan.

CPS briefed $110 million in data-center contract revenue. That is a utility figure, not a school-district PILOT, and not a household rate cut.

Data last checked 2026-09-04 · Current public data is a snapshot, not a live meter