[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.

[uberduper]

A dozen people couldn't handle the number of daily nvidia compute tray RMAs one of these datacenters produces.

[bdangubic]

oh there is shipping & handling or just handling? :)

[uberduper]

Well they're liquid cooled, so there's some extra handling required. Then there's the sky high failure rate.

[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.

[MobiusHorizons]

I mean yes, but that would require demand right? The demand is currently for building data centers, should you just wait around for better things to be in demand? It’s definitely a strategy, but it doesn’t seem like the obviously necessary strategy

[bdangubic]

If someone wants to build a DC out in the middle of nowhere in a non-populated areas of whatever state, be my guest, I won't complain. I was specifically talking about where I live ( https://www.datacentermap.com/usa/virginia/ ), few of the top-10 most affluent counties in USA are here but also the most DCs in the world are here. There is a huge demand here for non-Data Centers that would bring a lot more to the economy than buildings guarded and surrounded by fences that you have to drive next to every day