Microsoft has spent the year promising communities it will be a "good neighbor" when building data centers, but a coalition of about 25 congregations and community groups in St. Joseph County, Indiana, says the company has gone quiet when asked to put a real number on that promise. We Make Indiana recently learned that Microsoft will only approve a series of one-time nonprofit donations totaling up to $1 million for the area around its 900-acre Granger data center—an amount the group says is not proportionate to the tax savings Microsoft receives.
The group has proposed a "Fair Share Agreement" under which Microsoft would negotiate directly with community members and contribute a small percentage of its annual data center costs to a fund overseen by an independent board. We Make Indiana initially planned to ask for as little as 1 or 2 percent, and its leaders say the 10 percent figure in a Pennsylvania bill is "very much on the high end." That bill, the Data Center Fair Share Act, would require legally binding community benefits agreements for data center developers.
The context is stark: states offer data center developers tax exemptions that can last decades, and a Georgia audit found the state gave up $474 million in sales taxes in one year while getting back just $41 million from the industry. Microsoft has acknowledged that matching employee donations—$229 million across 29,000 nonprofits in 2024—isn't enough, but it has not said what more substantial local investments would look like. The company appears no better or worse than Amazon, which has also offered one-time grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars to local charities, according to We Make Indiana members.