Great article….would be interesting to know the employment impact post construction of these big grey boxes. Have heard that as few as five people are needed to run a data center-certainly not a positive impact in light of the known and as yet unknown environmental and health issues caused by this industry. Further-it is amazing that taxpayers are asked to support industries which are, in effect, taking AWAY jobs through expanded use of AI. We have met the enemy and they is AI (sic from Pongo).
Funny you should ask about long-term employment in data centers, as we've been looking into it. Just this week Brookings released a new study on data center employment impacts (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-on-data-center-employment-effects/). The bottom line is that construction employment is high and temporary while operational employment is very small. Depending on the data center in question, the ratio of construction-to-operational employment can be 5:1 or 30:1. Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) showed in 2024 that a data center construction project might employ 1,500 people over 2-3 years while the center will only have 50 people in its operational phase - and about half of those are contract employees!
Smaller data centers might only have 5 people in them long-term (as you suggest), though that's generally on the low end of what we've seen so far. But it's definitely fair to say that the boom in data center-oriented employment is TEMPORARY. In that sense, this data center boom is akin to mining for finite resources and being left with the mess to clean up over the long-term -- all while the vast majority of the profits are funneled out of the state entirely.
My own Substack this morning is titled "House of Cards." The data center boom is built on debt, depletion, denial & deception. Power costs rising, community health exposed. Not everyone can win. When it collapses, Silicon Valley has cushy bunkers for billionaires. The rest of us will be on the hook. Here's the link: https://harrychancey.substack.com/p/house-of-cards
Great article….would be interesting to know the employment impact post construction of these big grey boxes. Have heard that as few as five people are needed to run a data center-certainly not a positive impact in light of the known and as yet unknown environmental and health issues caused by this industry. Further-it is amazing that taxpayers are asked to support industries which are, in effect, taking AWAY jobs through expanded use of AI. We have met the enemy and they is AI (sic from Pongo).
Funny you should ask about long-term employment in data centers, as we've been looking into it. Just this week Brookings released a new study on data center employment impacts (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-on-data-center-employment-effects/). The bottom line is that construction employment is high and temporary while operational employment is very small. Depending on the data center in question, the ratio of construction-to-operational employment can be 5:1 or 30:1. Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) showed in 2024 that a data center construction project might employ 1,500 people over 2-3 years while the center will only have 50 people in its operational phase - and about half of those are contract employees!
Smaller data centers might only have 5 people in them long-term (as you suggest), though that's generally on the low end of what we've seen so far. But it's definitely fair to say that the boom in data center-oriented employment is TEMPORARY. In that sense, this data center boom is akin to mining for finite resources and being left with the mess to clean up over the long-term -- all while the vast majority of the profits are funneled out of the state entirely.
My own Substack this morning is titled "House of Cards." The data center boom is built on debt, depletion, denial & deception. Power costs rising, community health exposed. Not everyone can win. When it collapses, Silicon Valley has cushy bunkers for billionaires. The rest of us will be on the hook. Here's the link: https://harrychancey.substack.com/p/house-of-cards