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.”
Other economic contributions
That JPMorganChase received $77 million for its data center expansion still makes it the largest subsidy of its kind per job, watchdog groups say.
“The county is giving away quite a lot of public money in exchange basically for nothing,” Kasia Tarczynska, senior research analyst at the national subsidy watchdog group Good Jobs First, told New York Focus.
The Rockland County Infrastructure Development Agency (IDA), which approved the tax breaks for the project, stands by the deal, telling New York Focus that though few permanent jobs will be created, the data center will provide more than $100 million in local economic benefits—including via ongoing upgrades from electricians and other tradespeople.
JPMorganChase noted that it’s currently one of New York state’s largest employers, and that the company contributes nearly $40 billion annually to the state’s economy.
Growing data center opposition
When the Rockland County IDA held a public hearing on the proposed subsidies for the expansion in 2024, no one showed up, and the deal was approved two weeks later.
Many people may not have been aware of data centers and their controversies in 2024. More recently, however, community opposition has been growing across the country.
Last year, Change.org saw a surge of petitions against data center projects: There were at least 113 petitions totaling around 50,000 signatures in 2025, compared to just 1 such petition regarding a data center in 2024, Fast Company previously reported.
In some instances, data center projects were even canceled after local pushback; at least 20 projects, representing $98 billion in investments, were blocked or delayed over a four-month period in 2025.Â
Still, state and local politicians have welcomed data centers, often giving them significant tax incentives, in part because of the promises of job creation.
Governor Janet Mills of Maine just this week vetoed a statewide moratorium on data centers, citing the promised jobs.
The freeze, which would have made Maine the first state to take such action, would have stopped a planned data center that is expected to create as many as 1,000 construction jobs and 150 permanent jobs.
The data center boom isn’t only happening in the United States. In Chile, one of the top Latin American countries in terms of data centers, Microsoft, Google, and others have promised to create thousands of jobs.Â
A Rest of World report, however, says those projects are creating far fewer full-time positions. Most are for security guards or cleaners—unlike the skilled IT jobs promised.Â
The JPMorganChase data center in New York isn’t the only such project that has gotten tax breaks, but now opposition is growing there, too.
A Rockland County planning board meeting in March for a second facility proposed by Databank was filled with residents “lined up to speak out” about the project, local outlet The Journal News reported. Many of the residents cited concerns about how the rising electricity demand will affect their utility bills.
“We are overly saturated with data centers,” one resident said at the hearing, according to The Journal News. “There is no talk of the cost to us, the local utility ratepayers.”
