Works in Progress founder @bswud says the secret to getting communities to support data centers is incentives: French landowners once put nuclear plants on their wine bottle labels "I would be very surprised if any of this support proved to be robust to things people actually care about in their real life." "Incentives are just really important here, and institutions that generate incentives. I suspect the same thing is true about data centers." "The US county with the most data centers is also the US county with the highest income, Loudoun County in Virginia. That's a really clean-cut case of a place where the incentives have driven their opinions because they get low property taxes." "There are interesting parallels for nuclear power. In the 1980s, France built out the world's biggest buildout of nuclear power. Mayors, local areas basically kept an enormous fraction of the business taxes generated by all these state-run nuclear power plants." "Local areas would do stuff like cut property taxes to zero for 40 years, or give everyone free cable TV. Local landowners would be so happy that they would put pictures of the nuclear power plants on their wine bottle labels. We're seeing the same kind of dynamic in the US." @WorksInProgMag @stripe

Works in Progress founder @bswud explains why Trump got the politics of data centers surprisingly right: you don't need to win the argument, you just need to get them built "In the US, we've seen state governments intervening, but ultimately county governments and city governments are gonna make a lot of the decisions here, and unincorporated land, and so on. That means there are so many ways for things to go." "I thought Donald Trump had a surprisingly good line on this on Twitter the other day in his video where he said, we're gonna make sure that they're not bothering people. They're on land which is currently not being used. They're gonna all have behind-the-meter power so that they don't make consumers pay extra. And they're gonna contribute property taxes. I thought that's the right kind of line, and it doesn't need to work in every place." "There's no need to win the argument here. Winning the argument is a nice bonus, but the actual thing that matters is building the data centers, and you can do that without winning the argument." @WorksInProgMag @stripe