I’d like to know how much of that money was spent locally. I assume most of it went to paying for equipment which was not bought in NoVa. Once the construction is done, these data centers are economically like to self storage facilities, but with huge electric bills.
From the article:
The company estimates Amazon’s current spending has spurred an $8.2 billion contribution to the commonwealth’s gross domestic product
So that is probably a closer figure to their local spending. Those electric bills do in theory lead to more robust utilities because the large baseline-style load make transient loads like residential HVAC and appliances look like smaller variances relative to the system capacity and because the increased size/revenue of the grid justifies improvements like more resilient transmission lines
