Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.
\n\nOn January 1, a new tax windfall will kick in that could benefit scores of rural data center projects—all thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
\n\nStarting next year, projects sited in tracts of rural land across the country will be newly eligible for a set of specific corporate tax benefits under a program expanded by the bill. The new rules “may significantly lower barriers for large-scale, capital-intensive projects in rural areas—most notably hyperscale data centers,” said a statement from Ways and Means Committee chair Jason Smith last year. “The economic case for building data centers in designated rural opportunity zones becomes far more compelling” with the new program, he continued.
\n\nBut experts warn that the results for rural communities could be mixed.
\n\n“Right now, the only requirement to get the benefits is capital investment,” says Emily Kraschel, a tax policy analyst at the Searchlight Institute, a public policy…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/