Ohio just hit the brakes on one of the most generous data center incentives in the country. Governor Mike DeWine ordered a pause on new applications for sales and use tax exemptions for data centers, a program that was supposed to cost the state $136 million but actually ran up a tab of roughly $1.5 to $1.6 billion in 2025.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a 12-fold overshoot, the kind of budget surprise that makes state comptrollers lose sleep.
How Ohio became the AI gold rush’s favorite tax haven
The exemption was designed to lure data center developers to the Buckeye State, and on that front, it worked spectacularly. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all piled in, collectively reporting $27.2 billion in capital expenditures tied to 2025 exemptions alone.
The 2024 figure was already eye-popping at $9.6 billion in qualifying capital investment, with the exemption costing Ohio $555 million that year.
