States across the U.S. are offering increasingly aggressive tax incentives to attract data centers — and it’s working. Billions of dollars in investment are flooding into regions offering exemptions on equipment, electricity, and property tax. But while the incentives race heats up, there’s one critical piece that often gets overlooked: the network.
A data center without high-capacity, scalable connectivity is just a massive, air-conditioned box storing compute power that can’t move at the speed modern applications demand. In the era of AI, cloud, and real-time data, bandwidth is as fundamental as power.
The problem? Very few providers have scaled long-haul networks in the last decade. Building and maintaining that infrastructure is capital-intensive, complex, and time-consuming — but it’s the only way to connect emerging AI hubs and cloud regions with the speed and resilience next-gen applications require. Zayo is the only digital infrastructure company to build long-haul networks at scale in the last decade.
So yes, tax incentives are reshaping where data centers get built. But the long-term value won’t come from what’s inside those facilities. It’ll come from what connects them. Because without the network, a data center is just a very expensive fridge.