The new North Carolina Data Centers Act, signed into law Wednesday morning extends the tax benefits available to single owners such as Google, Apple or Amazon to multi-tenant facilities where combined investment reaches $75 million.
The Data Center Infrastructure Act offers property and utility sales tax exemption to data center providers and occupants that have collectively invested at least $75 million in private funds in a given facility. Notably, such tax benefits accrue not only to the data center developer, but directly to their tenants as well, regardless of the tenant’s size or investment level.
Sentinel Data Centers, a New York based firm with a 420,000 square-foot center in Durham notes that “North Carolina was one of the earliest states to adopt data center tax incentive legislation which encouraged the building of large single-tenant facilities such as those constructed by Google, Facebook and Apple.
“Previously the North Carolina tax incentive statutes for data centers required a minimum investment of $150 – $250 million and did not enable tax benefits to accrue to occupants of multi-tenant facilities. The new legislation enables these incentives to propagate down to even the smallest of colocation users within qualifying facilities.”
Todd Aaron, co-founder and co-president of Sentinel, tells WRAL TechWire this act brings forth many of the same benefits for multi-tenant facilitaies. North Carolina already checked many of the boxes that make it good location: cheap power, labor. This is the last box checked. Government has done a great job in positioning North Carolina in an incredibly competitive manner.”
in 2001, Sentinel was an early pioneer in the “wholesale” data center business. Since its inception, Sentinel has developed more than 1.6 million square feet and 120 megawatts of best-in-class multi- tenant and build-to- suit data center solutions for a diversity of Fortune 500 enterprises across multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare, technology and biotechnology.
It has sites in New Jersey, New York, and Memphis in addition to Durham, where Aaron says plenty of space is still available.
