JPMorgan Chase received millions in tax breaks to expand a data center. It created 1 full-time job

In 2024, JPMorgan Chase applied to receive financial assistance from Rockland County, New York, in order to expand a data center in Orangeburg, a hamlet of under 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, 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 2024 development project was for an expansion of the data center. It’s specifically that expansion that will add just one full-time job, a company spokesperson noted. The expansion will also 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. Tech giants have been building 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 analy