A Common Sense Institute review suggests currently operating and proposed data centers in Iowa would generate $3.1 billion in property taxes by 2040.
Ben Murrey, CSI’s director of policy and research, said data center owners and operators have spent or plan to invest $53 billion in Iowa buildings and equipment by 2031. “Iowa is the leader in the Midwest in data center development and investment,” Murrey said.
As for the megawatts or overall capacity of data centers based on population, Iowa ranks second in the 12-state Midwest region, “only behind Ohio which has, I think, four times the population that we do,” Murrey said. About 12 million people live in Ohio. Iowa’s population is over three million.
If all the data centers proposed in Iowa are built, the Common Sense Institute’s economic models suggest that within five years, nearly 30,000 Iowa jobs would be directly or indirectly linked to data centers. “We know that average pay in the data center industry is about $126,000 a year and that’s nearly double Iowa’s statewide average, but it’s not just that data centers are hiring people who are in careers that lend themselves to higher salaries,” Murrey said. “It’s that for the same titles, data center jobs are paying more.”
Murrey said, for example, pay for security guards at data centers is about 12% higher.
Murrey also found Iowa data centers paid over $56 million in property taxes last year. Data centers are primarily built on agland and Murrey calculates an acre of land used for a data center generates 153 times more in property taxes than it did in its previous use for farming.
