No single reason attracted Google to north Alabama, where the company announced Wednesday it would build a $600 million data center in Jackson County.
Two state incentive packages, however, grabbed the high-tech company's attention.
"Alabama offers data center-specific incentives so that they benefit the data center industry, which was an important part of our decision to locate here," said Gary Demasi, director of global infrastructure at Google.
The seed that helped land Google and the 75 to 100 high-paying jobs at the new data center was sown three years ago when the legislature passed the Alabama Data Processing Center Economic Incentive Enhancement Act. State Rep. Dan Williams, R-Athens, sponsored the bill.
"When it comes to economic development in Alabama, we've just sort of been getting beat in the last year or two with a lot of stuff," Williams told AL.com in 2012. "And now with the economy as it is, you sort of have neighboring states raiding another state, trying to get a company to move there. So really these incentives are something we need to counter that."
The incentives would abate taxes on construction among other abatements.
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The second incentive that attracted Google became a law earlier this year.
"We brought in two incentives that we have not heretofore used," said Greg Canfield, state Secretary of Commerce. "One was the data center abatements package that was passed a couple of years ago with the mindset that we would use that as our tool to bring and attract more technology and data center-based projects. This will be the first time we've used it. There will be tax abatements depending on their final investment. If they hit $600 million - which they said they would, and we think they may eventually go beyond that - but at $600 million, they will have non-educational taxes abated on their property taxes.
"We on the state level passed a new incentive this year that was part of our strategy called the investor credit. So the investor credit over 10 years will allow them to recapture $50 million - no more than $5 million a year in that 10-year period - against their $600 million investment. So it's a very reasonable approach for us."
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