A Senate candidate wants to end the business and inventory tax. West Virginia also wants data centers. Someone should ask whether those two goals can coexist.
A Tax That Is Already on Life Support
Chris Pritt is running against incumbent Sen. Tom Takubo in the 17th Senatorial District primary, and he is making noise. On social media, Pritt recently posted a pledge that will resonate with virtually every small business owner in West Virginia: “In the WV Senate I’ll fight for small businesses! This includes working to END the business and inventory tax.”
It is a crowd-pleaser. It is also a statement that deserves a harder look than a campaign post typically gets, because West Virginia is simultaneously pursuing one of the largest economic development strategies in the state’s recent history, and the business and inventory tax sits at the center of that strategy in ways most voters do not fully understand.
Before unpacking the data center question, it is worth acknowledging something: Pritt is not alone in wanting this tax gone. The business personal property tax, which covers machinery, equipment, and inventory held by businesses, has been called a “bad tax” by economists across the ideological spectrum for decades. West Virginia voters rejected a constitutional amendment in 2022 that would have empowered the legislature to eliminate it, but the push has never stopped.
In 2025, Senate Joint Resolution 6 took another run at it. This year, SJR 12 was introduced in the 2026 session, again aimed at eliminating the tax on business inventory. The West Virginia Business and Industry Council listed its elimination as a top priority for 2026. The Tax Foundation, a respected national tax policy organization, has described inventory taxes broadly as “highly distortionary” because they force business decisions based on tax avoidance rather than sound economic logic.
So Pritt is swimming in a popular current. The policy intuition behind his pledge is reasonable.
But here is where it gets complicated.
What Data Centers Actually Pay
When West Virginia talks about attracting data centers, it is talking about warehouses full of servers and computer hardware, the physical backbone of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and virtually every digital service Americans use. These facilities represent billions of dollars in capital investment.
Under current West Virginia law, that investment is taxable. Servers and computer hardware owned by businesses are classified as tangible personal property and subject to the business personal property tax. That is the same tax Pritt wants to eliminate.
There is, however, an important wrinkle. West Virginia’s High Technology Valuation Act already gives data centers a dramatic discount. According to the West Virginia Division of Economic Development’s own fact sheet, tangible personal property including servers used in a high-technology business is valued for property tax purposes at just 5 percent of its original cost. A $100 million server farm is taxed as if it were worth $5 million. That same document also confirms that sales tax has been eliminated on purchases of computers, servers, hardware, building materials, and related property for direct use in a qualified high-technology business.
So the state has already built a generous on-ramp for data centers. They pay something, but far less than a standard manufacturer would.
The question Pritt’s pledge raises is this: if the business and inventory tax disappears entirely, do data centers pay anything on their equipment at all?
West Virginia Has a Stake in the Answer
This is not an abstract policy debate. In late March, Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced that Google has acquired land in Buffalo, Putnam County, to build a data center campus. Putnam County sits in the 8th Senatorial District, not the 17th. But Pritt is running for a seat in the West Virginia Senate, and the pledge he is making is a statewide one. What data centers pay in property taxes, and what counties keep, is a question that lands wherever these facilities are built.
Under the framework established by House Bill 2014, passed in 2025, data centers certified as “high impact” projects already face a heavily state-tilted revenue structure. Under that law, localities receive only 30 percent of property tax revenue generated by certified data center projects, with the remaining 70 percent going to the state. County officials and school districts have objected.
Now layer Pritt’s proposal on top of that. If the business personal property tax were eliminated outright, the remaining revenue stream from the equipment inside those data centers would shrink further, or disappear. The machinery and servers represent the bulk of a data center’s taxable value. The real property, the land and building, would still be taxable under any likely reform. But the equipment inside is the big number.
The Political Tension No One Is Saying Out Loud
Pritt’s pledge is aimed at small businesses, the hardware store owner frustrated by having to report and pay tax on his inventory every year, the manufacturer carrying raw materials through a slow season. That is the sympathetic face of the business and inventory tax debate, and it is a legitimate grievance.
Pritt frames this as a fight for small businesses, and that is a sympathetic case. But a blanket tax elimination does not distinguish between the corner hardware store and a billion-dollar server farm. Both get the same relief. The little guy and Google walk out winners together.
West Virginia is now actively competing against Virginia, Georgia, and other states to host data centers. Virginia, the largest data center market in the world, has built its competitive position through targeted incentives, not blanket tax elimination. The difference matters because targeted incentives can be structured with accountability, job creation requirements, and investment thresholds. Blanket elimination of a tax class benefits every company with equipment in the state, whether they employ two people or two thousand.
There is also the local funding question, which is not hypothetical. Statewide, roughly one-third of all property tax collections come from the personal property tax on businesses. School districts and county governments depend on it. In prior debates over this issue, counties like Cabell have projected losses in the tens of millions if the tax were eliminated without full state backfill. The legislative proposals to date have included revenue replacement language, but the mechanics of how the state makes counties whole have never been fully resolved.
Pritt has not spelled out his plan for any of that.
A Fair Question for a Primary Debate
None of this means Pritt is wrong to want the business and inventory tax gone. The argument for ending it is real and has serious supporters. What it does mean is that his pledge deserves a follow-up question, specifically in a state potentially hosting a Google data center campus:
If you eliminate the business and inventory tax, what happens to the property tax revenue from data center equipment? And if West Virginia loses that revenue stream, what do counties and schools receive instead?
Tom Takubo, for his part, supported HB 2014 and the existing data center framework. That framework already dramatically reduces what data centers pay locally. Whether Takubo or Pritt would do more for the counties hosting these facilities under their respective approaches is a legitimate argument for voters in the 17th District to weigh, because the senator they elect will cast votes that shape the answer.
The data center boom is arriving in West Virginia whether the 17th District race produces Pritt or Takubo. The question is which candidate has thought hardest about what that actually means for the counties absorbing these projects, not just the companies moving in.
West Virginia has spent a generation watching resources leave the state and the tax base follow. The pitch for data centers is that they represent a new kind of resource economy: high capital investment, durable infrastructure, and a footprint that does not move when commodity prices fall. That pitch only holds if the state and its counties capture something meaningful from it.
A Senate candidate who wants to eliminate the main tax on that equipment should be prepared to explain what replaces it. 🐝
The WASP contacted the Pritt campaign with questions about the fiscal mechanics of the proposal. No response was received.
The West Virginia Division of Economic Development’s technology industry fact sheet, which details the current High Technology Valuation Act and its treatment of data center equipment, is available here: https://westvirginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Pub_FactSheet_InfoTech_DEVO_web.pdf