[dylan604]

Once construction of a data center has completed, how many jobs will they actually be adding? It reminds me of the people saying that oil pipelines are good for jobs, but that's again only a temporary blip during construction. For data centers, for the sheer size of them, they are massively empty of people.

[kotaKat]

One data center in upstate NY tried to include a call center as part of it in their quote of "500 jobs" for a planned Bitcoin farm, but then mentioned that the call center would be doing 'healthcare advocacy' calls.

My stomach twisted because that can generally just mean one thing in my experience in the call center / tech support industry: outbound Medicaid/Medicare ripoff scam service calls.

Their DC never came to fruition, but a few others up here did. "Hundreds of jobs" didn't happen, they got maybe like 30 parts swappers and security dorks to run around an old Superfund site and play hardware babysitter.

[WarmWash]

Those things are cash cows for local municipalities. I don't think that aspect is communicated at all, or at least the media leaves that part out.

A town a with a $50M budget can easily have a single large datacenter cover the townsfolk's entire tax bill, and then some. The worst part is the fan noise, but I am sure they can figure that out.

[dylan604]

What? These things are built specifically where the towns give them tax breaks

[WarmWash]

Generally datacenters are built in less dense areas that already have low taxes. So the cost to "buyout" the town council (i.e. "We will cover 75% of your municipal budget") is a rounding error for the datacenter builders.

Its states and federal usually offering tax breaks. But at least on the lowest level, it's pretty cheap to buyout a rural town, and that's why you get these town councils voting 9-0 to approve the projects before anyone even hears about it.

[CodingJeebus]

"Job growth" is such an easily manipulated metric by companies to score tax breaks from governments, especially for companies like Amazon that can claim "our warehouse will create X jobs" while developing autonomous warehouse technology that significantly cuts the number of actual jobs on the back end.

Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they claimed they would, but of course they would never agree to such terms.

[ecshafer]

How many temporary and permanent jobs does an empty lot provide? Many temporary and a few permanent sounds much better.

[zerobees]

New York doesn't have many "empty lots". If it's agricultural land that's getting converted into datacenters, it probably supports a comparable number of temporary and permanent jobs per acre in the region's climate.

[skybrian]

It looks like farming is declining in New York?

> Over the past 10 years the number of farms and amount of land actively being farmed in the United States has steadily decreased. Between 2015 and 2025 the number of farms decreased by almost 10 percent and the land being farmed dropped by more than 4 percent. The changes in New York in this period have been more dramatic, with 15 percent fewer New York farms and 11 percent less land in farm production than in 2015.

https://www.osc.ny.gov/reports/new-york-farms-and-farmland-d...

National trend:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58268

[ecshafer]

Are you sure New York doesn't have many empty lots? I can go drive through Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo and find plenty. There's a ton of land that is not being farmed that are is fully of rocky, poor quality soil.

The data centers weren't going to go into NYC, but upstate New York has plenty of space for Data Centers. Oswego has two power plants, and could use two more. Building is good.