The mechanism. When Virginia, Ohio, Texas, and a growing list of states court hyperscale data centers, the headline incentive is a sales-and-use tax exemption on "qualifying computer equipment." Read the actual statutory language — Virginia's Data Center Retail Sales & Use Tax Exemption is the template most states copied — and it doesn't just exempt servers. It explicitly enumerates chillers, computer room air conditioners (CRACs), HVAC systems, cooling towers, water pumps and piping, plus electrical substations, power distribution equipment, cogeneration gear, batteries, and generators. That's not incidental. It's the tax code naming, line by line, the product catalogs of Vertiv and Eaton. Every state that dangles a "come build here" package to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google is simultaneously waiving 5-7% sales tax on the power and thermal-management hardware those hyperscalers must buy from a narrow set of vendors — meaning the abatement's real economic transfer flows through to whoever sells the switchgear and chillers, on every project, regardless of who "won" the site-selection headline.