In 2024, JPMorganChase applied to receive financial assistance from Rockland County, New York, in order to expand a data center in Orangeburg, a hamlet of fewer than 4,300 people.
The development agency approved the assistance, which totaled nearly $77 million in state and local tax breaks for the project. In return, documents show, the company said the expansion would create just one full-time job.
Now government accountability group Reinvent Albany has called out the deal as “the largest government subsidy ever recorded within the United States,” prompting questions about how much public money goes to projects that don’t create meaningful jobs for communities.
Short-term vs. full-time job creation
JPMorganChase has owned the Orangeburg building since 2017; it’s a former brownfield site that the company turned into a data center that currently employs 70 people, per the company. (New York Focus, which broke the story, wrote that the facility last reported 25 workers, and the original project proposal promised the creation of just five jobs.)
The development project approved in 2024 is for an expansion of that particular data center, and it’s specifically that expansion that will add one full-time job, a company spokesperson said, noting that the expansion would create 150 local construction jobs.
Data center projects often tout their creation of construction jobs, and growing data center demand has been a boon to that industry.
Still, such projects have been criticized for delivering mostly short-term jobs while providing “little durable local economic upside,” according to Brookings research, including “relatively little . . . large-scale employment.”
