Good Jobs First

Companies like Amazon, which have extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpyayers here, are racing to get more tax breaks that last into the 2050s before the moratorium goes into effect.

Hillsboro Mayor Beach Pace said Monday the city will stop signing enterprise zone tax break agreements with data centers until next month, and perhaps indefinitely.

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/05/hillsboro-mayor-orders-halt-to-new-data-center-tax-breaks.html?utm_campaign=theoregonian_sf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

“It’s the biggest capital expenditure since the Manhattan Project, and it isn’t going to create tens of thousands of jobs in the long term,” Good Jobs First's Elmo told The Verge. “It’s not some economic boom. Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Oracle, they’re shedding jobs in real time while spending billions on data centers so that other organizations can shed additional jobs through AI. At some point, people need to ask more critical questions about this.”
📷: panuma nikhomkhai from Pexels via Canva

Are data centers a boon or a boondoggle? Stream Data Center wants to invest $19.5 billion in a data center complex in Genesee County. Critics say the project would harm the environment and receive massive tax breaks – worth $1.4 billion – in exchange for just 125 permanent jobs.