[fusslo]

> Missouri campaign finance records show a political action committee — made up of labor unions that support data centers because of the jobs they create — spent almost $40,000 in the final weeks of the race on newspaper and digital ads and yard signs in support of the four council members booted from office.

Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create?

Are there jobs for local residents?

[pwg]

A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.).

A small number of jobs for security guards.

Maybe a tiny number (one to three?) for individuals tasked with actual hardware swapping within the data center itself.

And all of the above assumes the data center owner does not "travel in" the requisite individuals on an "as needed" basis -- in which case the only jobs that may go to the locals is "security guard".

But all of the "sys-admin" management level work can be done remotely.

So the actual number of new jobs that arrive in the locality is likely on the order of 20-30 or fewer.

[SteveNuts]

Yeah and that type of work bid usually goes to huge conglomerates. A local mom and pop electrician shop isn’t going to be building a datacenter, it’ll be something like Siemens.

[EvanAnderson]

A friend of mine is an independent electrician in the Columbus, OH area. Last summer he told me he was getting plenty of datacenter construction work, albeit it was in the form of subcontracted jobs from the larger firms who were awarded the contracts.

[duskwuff]

Even if the datacenter does hire some local labor for construction, that's still all temporary jobs. It's not an ongoing source of employment for locals.

[dzhiurgis]

They'll pay tons in taxes to energy company.

[quickthrowman]

I work for an electrical contractor that does large data center projects and we almost always partner with a local contractor to provide labor from the local union(s).

[sleepybrett]

sure, that only covers construction though. Once the thing is built they are going to travel in all the maintenance that needs to happen, and that local tradesman is not going to get to many new home construction jobs after it goes in. Who wants to live nearby a noise polluter like that?

[uberduper]

Local shops will absolutely be contracted to work on the project. A datacenter project like this can't find enough qualified electricians.

[pseudohadamard]

I would imagine there aren't too many electricians in Yeehaw, Minnesota, trained and qualified to do gigawatt data center installs. So they'll freight in contractors to do that work, and maybe temporarily employ a few locals for a month or two for auxiliary stuff.

More generally, this is the universal playbook when someone wants to dump some megaproject on a community that doesn't want it: This will create X jobs and inject $Y into the local economy. Can you name one case where this actually happened? It's usually very few additional permanent jobs and, particularly for public-works stuff, millions or even billions in extra debt to pay off. But don't worry, this next thing we're working on once we get the local council to issue a permit to bulldoze your forest park, that will bring in jobs, we promise.

[cucumber3732842]

>Yeah and that type of work bid usually goes to huge conglomerates.

Which are exactly the kinds of entities that the trades unions and industry interest groups are most deeply in bed with.

[adolph]

> A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.).

Its no car dealership but probably a reliable source of work-orders. Seems like a "gigascale" datacenter would be a large job for a tradesman to be a subcontractor within and afterward its scale means continuous upgrades/maintenance.

Is there any literature of ongoing economic impact of similar facilities?

[jagged-chisel]

How many of these are on-going jobs vs during construction and as-needed? I think you're right it'll be only security guard jobs. Even if they don't travel in workers, it's quick short-term tasks that maybe locals can perform, but that's not "creating jobs."

[hahahacorn]

This argument has always been such a weird goalpost shift for me. Even at my full time job I am getting strung together by 3-12 month projects. Everyone works on projects. When this data center is done in a year, we'll (hopefully) need to build something else, keeping those people employed.

Like, of course it's creating a job. If you create a million 1-year jobs every year, that's a million jobs.

[LargeWu]

Because the "it'll create X jobs" implies it's ongoing. It's a disingenuous attempt to oversell the benefits because they know if they're transparent about it, suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great deal.

[Rekindle8090]

Actually if they were honest they'd say "It'll create x careers", which is a much better deal than just a job. Friend went from 17 an hour at his first DC to 100/hr last year with 70 people on his team.

[jdubs1984]

In a town of 12K people I'd say it's incredibly unlikely. Most of if not all the labor to build it will be flown in, most of the labor to staff it will be moved in.

And once it's built it's not like a Walmart or something where you need enough staff to police the crowds...there are not crowds. There's some rack and stack needs, and some ongoing cabling needs generally,and some other stuff, but they are staffed as lightly as humanly possible.

I suppose w/ all the out of town labor to build it there will be more waitress and hotel cleaning jobs for a while...a town or over...where they can actually house the labor.

Oh, and they are getting an Olive Garden...which will probably employ more local labor.

[cestith]

Festus isn’t small because it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s right there with Arnold, Barnhart, Crystal City, and other far south suburbs of St. Louis. The metro area can build it. It’s not like Boeing brings in remote labor from around the country every time they build an F-15.

[dzhiurgis]

> And once it's built it's not like a Walmart

Yet it creates infinitely more value than a supermarket.

[hahahacorn]

It will raise $8-$18m/yr in property tax revenue for the county (depending on abatements), which will likely increase the local counties revenues by 30-50% and primarily go towards local schools, as well as an estimated 50-150 jobs.

If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity, it's an extremely low environmental & industrial (all contained clean rooms, no air pollutants, risk to local water systems, etc.) once in a lifetime boon for the local municipality.

The council members (probably, again depending on abatements & water/energy policy) did represent their constituents well.

[LargeWu]

"If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity..."

This assertion is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, and when it isn't true, it can cause huge externalities not just for the local community but possibly an entire region. It also does not address the noise problem.

Additionally, your jobs estimates are likely high and include short-term construction jobs which may not even go to locals anyway.

[disillusioned]

"Pay for their own electricity" is just not an actual thing that seems to be doable at this scale without those externalities. You're talking about sites that are, say, 800MW or 1GW or more... these use more power than tens of thousands of homes, and require entirely new power plants, interconnects, lines run, transformer costs, staff, etc. Typically, power companies amortize those costs and spread them over ratepayers, and when it's just part of the normal induced load of population growth, that's just how things go, and the system works.

In these cases, the rates that these DCs are paying for power are nowhere close to being able to fully absorb or offset the additional CapEx that the power companies are suddenly tasked with, even if they put up, say, the capital for IC, which is usually what's required. So the remaining new shortfalls get spread over the remaining ratepayers, ie, everyone else. If the demand wasn't induced by the build of these massive sites that, strictly speaking, aren't "necessary," then the rates wouldn't have to climb to accommodate them.

Frankly, there should be laws against power companies raising ratepayer rates to accommodate infrastructure investments driven solely by DC/fab load inducement.

[dzhiurgis]

It is way better than wasting power on house heating and watering your lawns. It actually creates economic value.

[array_key_first]

Heating homes keeps humans alive who then go onto work, creating economic value.

A DC supplies, like, 12 jobs maybe. The 10,000 homes worth of power it uses supplies 20,000 jobs, maybe more if some older kids are working at the local Dairy Queen.

[dzhiurgis]

This is deranged. It's like saying entire economy hinges on underwear manufacturing because everyone needs one pair.

[array_key_first]

Yes, if we stopped making underwear the economy would suffer a lot. That's just plainly true, I don't know why you perceive reality as "deranged". I believe they make medication for that, you might look into it.

Human needs are a prerequisite for human productivity. Heating is actually more important than data centers. I think 99% of people would agree with me on that.

[AlexeyBelov]

No, you don't understand. Sending bytes back and forth creates real economic value. We shouldn't heat homes and have supermarkets in this day and age, the margins are miniscule.

[nixass]

> Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents?

If locals are qualified then yes. The DC itself does not have many permanent staff (tech, facilities, security) but loads of work is contracted. I'd say that great majority of the work done in and around the DC campus is outsourced, and it creates work for plenty of people.

[jagged-chisel]

It doesn't create ongoing jobs. It creates short term work, and perhaps the occasional momentary task. The only permanent jobs will be physical security.

[Rekindle8090]

What do you think people working in construction actually do when the project is done? Just spend the rest of their life homeless? No, they go to the next project.

[pwg]

The problem is that when the lobbyists are pitching these builds to the local town councils, the "create X jobs" part of the marketing is very carefully worded to heavily imply "X long term jobs will be created" while also not actually directly saying "X long term jobs will be created". They want the council members thinking X long term jobs, but want to avoid legal liability for lying later when the reality of X was 99% temporary jobs lasting 6-12 months and 1% long term jobs for the community.

And few council members seem to have been snookered enough yet that they know to ask the marketing lobbyist the pointed question: "How many of those X jobs are long term and will persist after construction and build-out is completed?".

[jnovek]

Are you talking about contractors just while the DC is under construction or after it’s built as well? Google wants to build one in my home town and I’m questioning what value it will bring to the community.

[bdangubic]

to build - yes. after it is built - no. so there is some temporary work but nothing permanent

[nixass]

You're wrong. People are probably impressed by the dollar value number it takes to build a DC/campus and then expect that the number of hired people should be "proportionally" equally high. It doesn't work like that but DCs definitely create more than enough local jobs for qualified even after it's built

[bdangubic]

With all due respect this is a vague as you can make a statement. What is more than enough local jobs? I drive by roughly 20 DCs on any given week between driving my kid to school and then to practice, the parking lots for the DCs are smaller than those of Chuck E Cheese and even at that size you never see more than 10-15 cars parked there. So not sure what more than enough is but it does not help much local economy

[dilyevsky]

This. At least until we’re at a point where some guy in the Philippines operates a telepresence android this is definitely a net gain for the community.

[soco]

I'll repeat a question asked somewhere else: what exactly are those local jobs after it's built? Can somebody care to list?

[uberduper]

There's going to be continued support from local electricians, low voltage wiring vendors, various facilities service companies, HVAC, and now plumbers.. lots of plumbers. So many leaks. A site like this is going to have probably a few hundred full time people on site all the time in addition to the contracted folks.

[array_key_first]

A DC does not have a few hundred full time people on site 24/7, it's going to be less than a dozen. It takes much, much less people to run a data center than people think.

[phil21]

Electricians. Top skilled folks for the most part who can do industrial level conduit work and the type who can operate switching gear and control systems. There is enough of this ongoing work for these huge facilities to effectively employ a half dozen full time contractors or more. One of the facilities I work the most in has electrical contractors on-site every single day, with at least a few trucks in the parking lot. These are local union guys. Always something breaking, needing maintenance, or a new area of the facility being refreshed. The facility is over a decade old and the work has never slowed down.

Plumbers. Cooling these facilities takes vast amounts of plumbing work. And it's also typically some of the highest skilled plumbing needed outside of refinery and other manufacturing plant work. When you have 50 giant chillers running 24x7 at least one is undergoing some form of maintenance at any given time.

Probably overlapping with the above, but HVAC technicians. Again, the scale of these facilities means constant work being available as you are operating at miniature city sized installations.

Security guards of course. Not really material though. I've noticed more armed guards than before, with at least two on duty 24x7. As these places get more controversial, I imagine this sort of staffing will increase.

On-site (IT) technicians. For facilities these sizes, you will be staffing it 24x7 and have a large enough crew to get basic refresh projects done. Hard to really estimate this, but in the dozens of full time labor for these giant projects. Think folks who can pull cable, troubleshoot basic hardware, swap drives/bad RAM sticks, etc. For the larger refresh projects contractors typically get flown in during a surge so on-site staffing is relatively minimal, but very few facilities are operating "lights out".

Then you have facility management - highly skilled positions that know how to operate all the electric/mechanical and cooling equipment during emergencies. Every facility I've worked in is staffed by a crew of around half a dozen of these folks or so, with the top tier subject matter experts being flown in during critical emergencies. These are the guys generally coordinating all the contract labor above.

Probably a couple mid-tier network engineers and higher skilled sysadmin types as well depending on who is operating it. Everyone loves to pretend these are highly automated and copy/paste facilities hyperscalers are just perfect at executing - but there is a lot of "dirty" hands-on work to be done since that stuff is not nearly as perfect as advertised and often requires hands-on problem solving and on the spot hacks to get stuff going. As anywhere, how the sausage gets made is a lot uglier than the marketing.

Once you get out of the highly competent hyperscalers, the above numbers go way up. Enterprise datacenter operators are going to need far more on-site labor due to simply not being great at this sort of work. The stories I hear of some current builds are rather humorous in how many people it's taking to get stuff working - basically solving what should be automated via manual processes.

It's not a lot of jobs, but for these huge 100's of Megawatt facilities the low-end is probably in the 100+ range of FTE equivalent labor after construction is completed. Everyone but security and the basic "remote hands" type employees would be in the $100k+ salary range.

[bdangubic]

> It's not a lot of jobs, but for these huge 100's of Megawatt facilities the low-end is probably in the 100+ range of FTE equivalent labor after construction is completed. Everyone but security and the basic "remote hands" type employees would be in the $100k+ salary range.

For the size and resources they are using you can build a lot of other things here that will employ significantly North of 100 (this is too many but lets keep it for the sake of argument) employees with significantly North benefit to the population than F'ing data centers.

[dilyevsky]

At least when i was at google, more than a decades ago at this point, hardware ops guys were locally sourced

[rkomorn]

When I was at (then) Facebook, this was mostly the case, but we also ran data centers with a hundred thousands of servers off a dozen local techs.

Facebook (and Google as well, IIRC) prided themselves on how few people they needed to run the datacenter.

Maybe I'm jaded but "we created 50 jobs" just doesn't hit that hard.

[dilyevsky]

I mean it’s a warehouse sized building, unless you’re doing a call center boiler room in there how many more jobs you’d expect?

[rkomorn]

Me? Not many, but I also happened to work in adjacent roles that had me more informed than the average engineer.

People whose communities are affected? I think it'd be reasonable for them to expect more for it to be worth it.

[polski-g]

There will be at least 5 employees working as smart hands 24/7, so probably 3 shifts -- 15 people. Plus 1-2 security agents working 24/7, another 6 jobs. Plus a foreman with some maintenance crew for HVAC/electrical (not 24/7) so probably another 1-3 jobs.

That's a really sweet deal for a town with only 11k people and no other external investments on the horizon.

[kjs3]

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce[1], 1688 while being built, 157 on-going jobs. I assume this is some 'average' datacenter; I didn't pursue methodology.

[1] https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/ctec_datacenterrp...

[altairprime]

Almost none. Its entire value is in one-time construction regional purchasing and the ability to say the word “jobs” to the cameras. Occasionally they have the guts to charge market rates for resources or taxes but for the most part that’s heavily discounted. (See also e.g. The Dalles’ attempt to secretly sell much of its watershed to datacenters.)

[uberduper]

Many jobs during construction. A site like this is a substantial multi-year construction effort.

Long term permanent jobs.. not so much.

[cestith]

A few dozen jobs in a town of 12,000 is nothing to sneeze at.

[dgllghr]

As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, there are definitely ongoing jobs, but in this area they are mostly filled with H1B workers. The real money is in development