This is an old article from Jan 2007, but interesting in that Valleywag, Silicon Valley's tech gossip Rag, jumped on Google for its North Carolina facility writing:

The fabulously profitable search engine, having pitted two depressed areas in the Carolinas against eachother, has picked Lenoir in Caldwell County as the location of a giant new server farm. I'm sure there will be plenty of rhetoric about the virtues of Lenoir, a former center for North Carolina's battered furniture industry. But Google just chose the county from which it could extract the most grotesque tax breaks.
Google was offered 150 acres on a plate, a 30-year break on real-estate taxes, and a grant from the state government. In short, a $500,000 sweetener for each of the 200 jobs Google will create.