Kendall County Times

Illinois state Rep. Keith Wheeler (R-Oswego) is celebrating his prominent role in the passage of Senate Bill 690, which provides the state’s first incentives for data centers investment upwards of $250 million in new projects that create jobs across the area.

“I voted for and helped to pass the package that includes this data center tax incentive to create Illinois jobs for Illinois families,” Wheeler said in a press release posted to his website. “The Chicago area ranks third in the country for data center capacity, but industry experts have long cautioned that without a tax incentive to attract and retain the facilities, Illinois is at risk of falling behind. With this new law, Illinois is poised to become a destination for economic growth in the tech industry.”

SB 690 frees qualifying data centers from having to pay state and local sales taxes on needed equipment like cooling and heating equipment, servers and storage racks. Among the qualifications are that the center invests at least $250 million in the facility and hires a minimum of 20 full-time employees over a five year period. The bill also includes an additional benefit for locating in an underserved area.

After growing 7 percent over a yearlong period beginning in June 2017, the Chicago data center market ranks among the largest in the country, generating roughly $322 million in state and local revenue across the state in 2017.

Data centers are large facilities housing computers that process and distribute large amounts of information for an array of different industries, among them storing images, emails and word documents.