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Nebraska independent candidate Dan Osborn, in his second run for U.S. Senate, has made a habit this cycle of creating digital ads that are only slightly less over the top than the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once. The latest, set up as a mock ad for his opponent Sen. Pete Ricketts, praises him for welcoming racks of computers to Nebraska’s open spaces, “finally delivering the tax relief for Google and their hardworking air conditioners that struggling Nebraska families have cried out for.” Then Ricketts zaps pure energy from his hands to summon data centers onto farm fields. It’s something to see.
But if you excuse the Green Lantern–style pyrotechnics, the facts in the ad are all true. If anything, Ricketts has been an even more aggressive booster of data centers than the spot makes him out to be.
Obviously, data centers are one of the critical contested issues in the midterms, with Republicans now scrambling to hide their past support. But Ricketts’s record on data centers highlights a particular vision for economic development, notably prevalent in red states, that is indistinguishable from corporate welfare.
Three pictures from Ricketts’s time as governor display his approach to data centers; in all of them, he is literally dressed as someone building the giant server warehouses himself. In 2017, Ricketts picked up a shovel to announce a planned Facebook data center on 146 acres near Papillion, Nebraska. He personally recruited Facebook to Papillion, part of a planned “data center hub” in the region that he nicknamed “Silicon Prairie.” During a facility tour the following year, Ricketts appeared in a bunch of photos in a hard hat and neon construction vest. And in 2019, Ricketts donned a Google hard hat at the groundbreaking of a $600 million data center in Papillion, which he hoped would “rival the data centers over in Iowa.” That facility was later expanded for another $750 million.
Asked why all this activity was happening, Ricketts said that “the number one reason these technology companies are coming to Nebraska is our people.” If by “people” he meant “tax breaks for giant tech companies,” he was right.
The ImagiNE Nebraska Act was a typical economic development bill in that it handed out corporate tax breaks to entice companies to locate in the state. Ricketts signed the law in 2017. Central to these were property tax abatements: From January 2021 until an executive order paused any incentives to data centers in July 2026, tech firms received $519 million in property tax exemptions from the Ricketts law. Data centers got another $317 million in tax credits, sales tax exemptions, and direct refunds from the law. About $311 million of this total went to the Facebook facility in Papillion specifically. All these numbers came from the office of the state’s current Republican governor, Jim Pillen.
So when Osborn’s ad points out that “Pete delivered $836 million for data centers,” that’s simply a tallying up of data center tax breaks from the ImagiNE Nebraska Act, which were so egregious that the Republican governor who succeeded Ricketts had to stop them.
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This tendency to funnel money to corporations to earn their support didn’t end in the governor’s mansion. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) is littered with this kind of corporate tax breaks, all justified as spurs to investment. The law, for example, made permanent the 100 percent bonus depreciation, which allows companies to immediately expense investment in materials. This is particularly useful for data centers, which are just big hunks of servers and wires and air conditioners. Microsoft has already saved up to $12 billion in taxes from this provision, according to its annual report, with billions more going to the likes of Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
This giant giveaway is also cited in Osborn’s mock ad, which states that “As senator, Pete voted on a permanent measure to let developers write off critical data center infrastructure.”
Beyond bonus depreciation, the Prospect has reported that six companies tied to the data center build-out received $83 billion in tax breaks from OBBBA provisions last year.
None of this is a mistake or an oversight: It’s the considered way that Republicans think the economy should work. Corporations get billions of dollars for the privilege of investing, and that’s the only way to create good-paying jobs. This logic even holds in the case of data centers, where jobs after construction are scarce. In the 2019 Google announcement, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who is retiring, boasted that the project was already bringing in 30 jobs. 30! The per-job spending on this type of economic development is astronomical.
Bacon also touted, in a way that no politician would today, that the data centers around Papillion “use more power than the entire city of Lincoln.”
Ricketts has used the typical Republican line that data centers are “a community decision,” and that cities should negotiate favorable deals for themselves in exchange for allowing development. But when he was governor, in a uniquely powerful position to negotiate with these companies, he didn’t extract anything. The money transfer all went in one direction, from Nebraska’s treasury to Google and Facebook.
Suddenly, the giveaways just look like giveaways, and the claims of community investment and economic development look absurd.
Big Tech has returned the favor to Ricketts for the billions it has received by kicking back a relative pittance in campaign contributions. The corporate PACs for Google and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) have given $20,000 and $2,500 to Ricketts’ campaign, respectively. Kenneth Stinson, the former chair of data center developer Kiewit, gave $200,000 to the Pete Ricketts Victory Fund joint fundraising committee, as well as maxing out for Ricketts personally. Employees of Tenaska, which is planning the largest data center in the U.S., gave Ricketts $17,000 this cycle. These donations pale in comparison with the $5.25 million that Ricketts, a billionaire scion of the founder of TD Ameritrade and part-owner of the Chicago Cubs, has plowed into his campaign from his own pocket. But every little bit helps. And if Ricketts were not a billionaire, those donations would almost certainly have been larger.
Ricketts benefits in a different way from the data center boom. He has personal holdings of over $1.5 million in investment funds with AI holdings like Silver Lake, BITKRAFT, RPM Ventures, and more, according to his personal financial disclosures.
That fits with this line in the Osborn ad: “You may not trust artificial intelligence, but you can trust Pete Ricketts to look after the people invested in it, like him.”
Republicans are nervous about the race in Nebraska. The Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC for Senate Republicans, just placed $8 million in advertising spending into the race, following a $7.5 million ad buy from a subsidiary of Fairshake, the crypto industry–funded super PAC. President Trump was in Nebraska to boost Ricketts last week. Polling has shown a close race; in the last six polls since Labor Day, Osborn has led in three and Ricketts has led in three.
Data centers are not the only thing Osborn is focused on in Nebraska: He talks a lot about a broken agricultural system that has impoverished ranchers and enriched middlemen meatpackers while consumers pay more. But the important thing about data centers is how they expose the entire project of business-friendly politics, used by Republicans and even some Democrats in municipal government.
The care and feeding of big business is simple: pass off tax breaks to corporations and cronies, and hope they provide enough jobs that constituents don’t notice the giveaway. This meets its limit when the recipients of the largesse are the biggest companies in the world, installing racks of servers that don’t need much human intervention at all. That’s on top of all the resources it takes to keep the facilities running, and the impact on energy prices and basic neighborhood sanity, given the noisy hum these things produce.
Suddenly, the giveaways just look like giveaways, and the claims of community investment and economic development look absurd. That’s been true for many other government subsidies for projects like Amazon headquarters or sports stadiums, but with data centers the grift is more apparent.
And this just may cost a Republican senator his seat in Washington.
