Benefits Beyond Connectivity

Missouri’s data center industry is helping grow the state’s economy and delivering measurable returns to communities from Kansas City to St. Louis and to towns and counties across the state.

According to data from PwC, in 2024, Missouri’s data center industry:

• • Contributed approximately $13.3 billion to the state’s GDP
  • Generated an estimated $1 billion in state and local tax revenue
  • Provided more than $7.6 billion in labor income to hardworking Missourians
  • Supported more than 85,000 total jobs across the state

Some Missouri data centers will generate over 9,000 times more tax revenue than the prior land use did over 25 years. In Montgomery County, land that previously generated less than $9,000 a year in property taxes, or about $200,000 over 25 years, will host a new data center campus projected to generate up to $1.8 billion in tax revenue, sending well over $100 million to schools, roads and first responders. Additionally, data centers in Missouri have contributed $3 million toward Montgomery County emergency dispatch services and are making roads safer with a new bridge over the Norfolk Southern Railway.

The data center industry supports more than 85,000 jobs for Missourians across a broad range of educational backgrounds. From data center technicians and facility managers to electricians, HVAC technicians, network engineers, and cybersecurity specialists, data centers allow Missourians to stay and work in their own communities.

Data centers in Missouri are committed to responsible water use. For example, some Missouri data centers don’t use water for cooling about 90% of the time, while others consume even less once operational. And many new data centers are designed to utilize reused or recycled water.

Nationally, data center water-related spending on municipal utility upgrades, on-site treatment and reuse systems are projected to exceed $4.1 billion through 2030, which are investments that modernize water systems for the whole country.

Data centers are highly energy-efficient facilities that help enable energy savings for homes and businesses. The industry prioritizes increasing energy efficiency, and facilities are designed to optimize energy use across their operations. In fact, data centers are helping fund new energy projects, enough to power 8 million U.S. homes.

Keeping data centers on American soil is critical to our national security. Data centers ensure U.S. competitiveness in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies that are essential to our continued economic leadership and national security.

Missouri is part of that mission. St. Louis is home to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s new $1.7 billion Next NGA West campus, the largest single federal investment in the city’s history, where thousands of analysts collect and distribute the geospatial intelligence that supports military operations, homeland security, and disaster response. All of it depends on secure, reliable data center infrastructure built right here in Missouri.

Missouri is building the future now. Google is developing a $1 billion data center campus at Kansas City’s Hunt Midwest Business Center, Meta has invested more than $800 million in a hyperscale data center in Kansas City’s Golden Plains Technology Park, and Amazon is investing several billion dollars in Montgomery County – putting Missouri at the center of the country’s AI and cloud infrastructure.