By Randy Hutcheson
Every day, Birmingham residents generate enormous amounts of monetizable digital exhaust — streaming movies, using GPS, storing files in the cloud, scrolling social media, shopping online, and increasingly asking AI to do tasks for us.
That data has real monetary value.
According to the Baltimore Sun, the average commercial value of an internet user’s data is $6,563 per year — nearly $400,000 over a lifetime. Multiply that by Birmingham’s population, and residents collectively produce roughly $1.3 billion a year in digital value that flows directly to global tech companies.
Birmingham citizens already subsidize Big Tech at a rate of more than a billion dollars annually — before the city gives away a single tax break.
How much are we willing to give?
Digital Extraction Meets Tax Extraction
Colonization no longer requires armies. Today it happens when outside companies extract value from a community while the community absorbs the cost. In the digital world, extraction happens through our data. In the physical world, it happens through our tax base. And the place where those two forms meet — where our daily digital habits become someone else’s profit — is the data center.
Data centers are simply the industrial‑scale version of the same model: wealth flows upward, costs stay local, and the public pays for the infrastructure that makes the extraction possible.
Before defending the Nebius deal, let’s acknowledge its strongest points. Birmingham is playing the same incentive game as every other city. No money is paid up front. And yes, the project will generate an estimated $87 million for Birmingham City Schools, which could be transformative.
But none of that changes the structure of the deal: a 30‑year tax abatement for a foreign company with no community benefits agreement, no local hiring requirements, and no renewable‑energy commitments.
It is part of a national incentive arms race that economists say drains public revenue without changing corporate behavior. Cities compete against one another for companies that would have come anyway.
Which raises a simple question: how long can America keep competing against itself?
Alabama’s Long Pattern of Extraction
Alabama’s political dysfunction accidentally protected some of the most beautiful land in America — no Atlanta style sprawl, no wall‑to‑wall development. But the cost of that “accidental conservation” has been paid by everyday Alabamians:
- Underfunded schools
- Underpaid teachers
- Rural hospitals closing
- Crumbling infrastructure
- A billion dollars poured into prisons
- And now, 30‑year tax breaks for a company bringing 78 jobs
Auburn historian Wayne Flynt documented this pattern clearly: Alabama has spent generations serving as an extraction zone for other people’s prosperity. Wealthy outside interests hollow out the state’s resources, leaving ordinary Alabamians to shoulder the burden of weak schools, low wages, and fragile public institutions.
The Nebius deal fits the pattern perfectly.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
The Industrial Development Board approved:
- 65% off non‑education property taxes
- 80% off non‑education sales taxes
- For up to 30 years
Thirty years. A generation of foregone revenue. A potential $3.2 billion incentive over three decades.
And what does Birmingham get? Seventy‑eight jobs. Not 7,800. Not 780. Seventy‑eight.
Europe Would Never Allow This
Here’s the part that should stop everyone cold: Europe doesn’t do this. EU state‑aid rules prohibit long‑term, company‑specific tax abatements, especially for foreign firms. Amsterdam couldn’t give Nebius a 30‑year tax break even if it wanted to. Helsinki didn’t give Nebius a tax break.
Yet Birmingham — a city with half the per‑capita income — is being asked to do exactly that.
The Irony: “Grow Birmingham from Within”
Birmingham is working hard to grow companies from within. Yet the largest incentive package in the city’s history went to a foreign‑owned company with no local supply chain and no multiplier effect.
Meanwhile, Birmingham‑born companies get modest incentives, strict job requirements, and far less public attention.
Common sense says this is backwards.
The Real Ledger of Colonization
If decades of corporate giveaways were supposed to strengthen Alabama’s economy, then why can’t an average family afford to send a child to Auburn anymore?
In 1990, state appropriations covered about 70% of Auburn’s operating budget. Today, it’s roughly 21%. When you give away and reallocate the tax base, someone has to make up the difference — and that someone is the Alabama family trying to send a kid to college.
Public money flows upward. Public costs flow downward.
A Closing for Alabama
I left Alabama decades ago. Not because I stopped loving Birmingham — I never have — but because the politics felt repressive, the decisions felt small, and the people in charge seemed more committed to preserving power than building a future.
Scripture tells us: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” If Birmingham’s treasure keeps flowing to outside corporations, then our future will follow it right out of town.
And: “A worker is worthy of his wages.” Yet the people who teach, heal, build, and raise families here pay full price while multinational companies get a discount.
We can choose differently. We can invest in our own people. We can grow our own industries. We can plant seeds that grow from our own soil.
The Nebius deal — clawback and all — is not that seed.
That’s not radical. That’s not socialism. That’s not partisan. That’s just common sense.
Randy Hutcheson is a Birmingham metro native, Auburn graduate, and former municipal urban design manager. He is a founding member of a community‑based nonprofit focused on equitable development and community engagement, and he currently owns and operates an urban design firm in Texas. His work centers on how government policy and law shape — and too often limit — the ability of everyday people to build wealth, power, and stability in our communities.
David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown. He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).
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Invite David to speak for free to your group about how we can have a more prosperous metro Birmingham. dsher@comebacktown.com
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