Fiscal Policy Is the Second Power Grid
Faraday's read: power and water decide whether a site is buildable; tax decides whether it is worth building. Two campuses can sit on identical grids and identical water tables and still land in different states because one county wrote a twenty-year property-tax abatement and the other did not. Treat the tax package as infrastructure — because in the economics of a large data center, it behaves exactly like a second power grid: invisible, decisive, and negotiated years before the first shovel.
Knowledge check
Why does Faraday describe fiscal policy as a siting determinant on par with power and water?
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Because tax treatment — abatements, exemptions, and federal credits — can swing the total cost of a project by amounts large enough to override otherwise comparable power and water conditions, so it decides where capital actually lands.