Valleywag
The fabulously profitable search engine, having pitted two depressed areas in the Carolinas against eachother, has picked Lenoir in Caldwell County as the location of a giant new server farm. I'm sure there will be plenty of rhetoric about the virtues of Lenoir, a former center for North Carolina's battered furniture industry. But Google just chose the county from which it could extract the most grotesque tax breaks.
Google was offered 150 acres on a plate, a 30-year break on real-estate taxes, and a grant from the state government. In short, a $500,000 sweetener for each of the 200 jobs Google will create.
There's nothing that new about states, particularly in the South, competing for new plants. North Carolina pitched for the BMW assembly line which was ultimately located in Greenville, in neighboring South Carolina.
Big auto plants often collect around them suppliers' smaller factories, which enlarges their economic impact. The Google server farm, despite the search engine's status as icon of the new digital age, will need electricity, air-conditioners — and thorough mopping.
