There is a saying in areas prone to significant flooding that “floods bring their own rain.” Like many legends and old wives’ tales, it isn’t scientifically true, but it has a hint of truth to it. In the days after a massive flood—the kind that Missouri is prone to experience—the enormous amount of water sitting in areas it normally doesn’t can generate so much evaporation so quickly that it seems to rain more frequently. Again, I’m not saying it’s true, but it offers an interesting comparison for data centers in Missouri.
When data centers go into smaller cities or rural areas, the assessed valuation they add is so large that it should generate substantial property tax cuts for all involved. How large a difference are we talking? Google just announced plans to build a $15 billion data center in Montgomery County, in east–central Missouri. It remains to be seen how much of that investment will be reflected in property tax totals, but since the largest expense is going to be for the very expensive equipment in the data center itself—and that equipment is taxable—we can safely assume the assessed valuation of the final project will be enormous and almost certainly measured in the billions.
This for a county that had an entire assessed valuation in 2025 of $315 million. Again, that’s every farm, house, car, tractor, building, boat, and cow in the county. Google intends to build the county’s second enormous data center, with an assessed valuation in the billions. Data centers don’t have kids who need teachers. They don’t require much in the realm of public services. What do you think happens when you add huge assessed valuations from businesses that don’t add much to the public service requirements? The answer should be tax cuts, which is exactly what happened in Loudon County, Virginia. The only way these data centers won’t generate large tax cuts is if the local elected officials make a big mistake and approve massive tax subsidies for them.
Which, of course, is exactly what they will do. Montgomery County officials gave Amazon a huge tax subsidy, just as Festus and Independence city officials did with their data centers. So instead of widespread tax cuts for an entire community, you get, at least in the short and medium term, huge tax cuts for the developers, which might result in slightly reduced taxes for everyone else. Local officials have it all backward. We should use the resources that make Missouri attractive to data centers and promise tax cuts for all instead of special subsidies for a few.
