Sentinel Data Centers announced today it expects its 420,000 square foot facility in Durham, North Carolina to qualify for the new sales tax incentives recently passed under the North Carolina Data Center Infrastructure Act. Upon obtaining formal qualification, Sentinel’s tenants, regardless of size, will realize previously unavailable sales tax exemptions on both IT and related data center equipment purchases and utility consumption.

SEE ALSO: Cobbler a la Mode – North Carolina’s Delicious New Data Center Incentive Program

Working alongside the leadership of the executive and legislative branches of North Carolina government and a consortium of large technology and regional data center organizations, Sentinel Data Centers actively supported the development and marketing of the Data Center Infrastructure bill over the past two years. Signed into law by North Carolina’s Governor Pat McCrory on September 30, 2015 the Data Center Infrastructure Act offers property and utility sales tax exemption to data center providers and occupants that have collectively invested at least $75 million in private funds in a given facility. Notably, such tax benefits accrue not only to the data center developer, but directly to their tenants as well, regardless of the tenant’s size or investment level.

“With the Data Center Infrastructure Act in place, our North Carolina tenants will benefit from the same tax incentives that, until now, have only been available to large single-tenant data center facilities,” says Todd Aaron, Co-President of Sentinel Data Centers. “We appreciate the considerable efforts made by both executive branch leadership and the House and Senate to address North Carolina’s competitive standing within the ever-changing data center landscape.”

Aaron added, “Through this legislation, our current and future tenants will save millions of dollars and will continue investing in North Carolina as one of the preeminent technology hubs in the country.”

North Carolina was one of the earliest states to adopt data center tax incentive legislation which encouraged the building of large single-tenant facilities such as those constructed by Google, Facebook and Apple. Previously the North Carolina tax incentive statutes for data centers required a minimum investment of $150 – $250 million and did not enable tax benefits to accrue to occupants of multi-tenant facilities. The new legislation enables these incentives to propagate down to even the smallest of colocation users within qualifying facilities.

“North Carolina was already an advantageous area for data center deployment with its eco-system of users, a highly-trained technical workforce, reliable and inexpensive power, rich connectivity and minimal environmental risk,” says Jeff Paschke, Research Director at 451 Research. “Now, with both sales and utility tax incentives available, at the micro-scale, to colocation customers, North Carolina has positioned itself as an even more attractive location for multi-tenant data centers.”