Data Centers Don’t Create Many Jobs. Build Them Anyway.
Critics of data centers like to point out that a finished facility employs a skeleton crew. They’re right. A running data center doesn’t create hundreds of permanent jobs, and my industry should stop pretending otherwise. I build these things for a living, and I’ll say it plainly. That’s not where the value is.
I just spent three weeks on the road visiting four data center sites, from upstate New York through Kentucky to the Permian Basin. What I saw is the part of the story the jobs statistic misses.
Start with a site in Kentucky on the Ohio River. An aluminum smelter operated there until it shut down about 15 years ago and took every job in town with it. For 15 years the plant sat rusting, contamination sitting in the ground near the river, and no one with any reason to touch it. Travel the Ohio and the Mississippi and you’ll see this over and over. Brownfield after Brownfield, old factory after old factory, nobody coming back.
Then a data center developer bought the site. Before pouring a single footing, they excavated hundreds of tons of contaminated soil and shipped it to Ontario, one of only two places in North America that could process it. The site is now planned for half a gigawatt of capacity. Without the data center, that cleanup happens never.
Get Eric Sonner’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Now the construction math. Sites like these carry around 1,500 workers for years. Not a summer. Years. Electricians, pipe fitters, crane operators, commissioning engineers, and every one of those paychecks lands in the community. In one town, we ate at a sandwich shop near the site and the owner couldn’t make Beef on Wick fast enough. The night we checked into our hotel, the three older guys drinking whiskey in the corner all turned out to be working the data center too. Hotels, catering, fuel, lumber. The construction economy around one of these builds is its own small boom.
Then comes the part that outlasts everybody. Tax base. We drove through a West Texas town of 900 people and passed the nicest school I have ever seen, a Friday night lights stadium and all, funded by decades of oil and gas taxes. Data centers are becoming that anchor for towns the factories abandoned. Roads, schools, infrastructure, paid for by a facility that asks almost nothing of local services in return. A quiet neighbor that funds the school district is a strange thing to protest.
So here’s where I land, and it’s the same place I land on every data center fight. The people who say these projects are all bad are wrong. The people who say they’re all good are wrong too. A data center that shows up, drains resources, and gives nothing back deserves the opposition it gets. A data center that cleans up a dead smelter, employs 1,500 tradespeople for years, and then funds the town’s school district for decades is the kind of neighbor most struggling towns would fight to get. The job of communities is to know the difference and negotiate for the second kind. The job of my industry is to be the second kind.
I got into this work with no college degree, through the union apprenticeship program, and my company now handles mechanical engineering, procurement, and commissioning for some of the largest AI data centers in the world. My friend Lance Teel and I host the Data Center Infrastructure Podcast, where we take you inside these builds. Episode two covers the road trip, the smelter site, and the trade careers this boom is creating for people without degrees.
Website. https://dcipodcast.com
Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-center-infrastructure-podcast/id6799820255
Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/0344qx3SJhse3TFPCHDyJc
YouTube. https://youtu.be/wPWLYjTFSnY
