Comment by mrandish
3 months ago
It would be deeply ironic if this data center (or similar ones using creative accounting), are among those featured in the TV commercials Meta has been running in expensive national prime time slots in recent weeks.
I've seen at least two different commercials each focused entirely on the personal story of a relatable, folksy person living in a small town in a fly-over U.S. state, talking about how the town was declining and times were hard - then Meta built a new data center nearby and this person along with many others got jobs there and now things are great. They are very well-produced with cinematic shots of rustic small-town main streets, dusty pickup trucks in rural settings and local high school football games. Aside from the obvious brand-washing, it would be extra on-brand if it turns out Meta doesn't even own the data center but still tries to take credit for it.
> Meta built a new data center nearby and this person along with many others got jobs there and now things are great.
Creating such bustling workplaces as https://maps.app.goo.gl/fc9AGtsVwiLA1vd88 https://maps.app.goo.gl/fHvTWK4rWqrsqsmr9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/RzggPfd3xbBQbdoo6 and https://maps.app.goo.gl/MBjun6ad4zJmmrRV7
These facilities will sometimes employ as many as 100 people - so a state that can attract three such data centres creates almost as many new jobs as an entire wal-mart store. Truly, a transformative number of jobs.
Yep. Massena, NY totally got hundreds of jobs out of the shitty Bitcoin miners that came to town like Coinmint and whoever the hell "North Country Colocation Services" is. We were saved! Everybody is rich and healthy and happy!
... wait, no, we're not. We're still an absolute shithole at the top of New York, now with a bunch of sea cans sitting in front of abandoned industry we lost decades prior, humming away doing nothing for any of us.
Most will be specialist jobs too, with people moving there to fill them and/or working on a rotating basis, requiring traveling. Truly magnificent for the community, and the environment--employees can bring bottled water with them from out of state to solve that issue!
I was sure you were exaggerating. But no!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCVkA1xebrQ
It turns out the one in this ad is in Altoona, Iowa. The ad focuses on how it revitalized the community by providing jobs, kind of glossing over how that might be reflected in the massive facility's ~30 car parking lot.
And incidentally, that data center currently shows no open positions on Meta's career website, although third-party sites still have some dated listing for advanced IT positions that were probably filled by non-locals.
Ugh.
30 sounded low to me, but looking at the sprawling Altoona facility in Google Maps https://maps.app.goo.gl/KGLEpJRFiwVKYob89 satellite photos show 52 parking spaces in use across 11 buildings.
Lots of construction workers in the areas where they're putting up new buildings, though.
That data center started operation over a decade ago. There's no reason to assume it should have any vacancies currently, nor is there any reason to assume its positions were largely filled by non-locals. And even if a few external folks relocated in some cases, isn't that economically beneficial to the area regardless?
Also given the 24/7/365 nature of data center operation, the number of employees will be larger than the number of parking spots.
Meta says over 400 people work on-site at the Altoona facility [0], but most of those are clearly working for a variety of smaller contractors given that the initial tax terms anticipated a few dozen direct employees [edit: wrong state] and no datacenter companies show up in the county's 50 largest employers [1].
[0] https://corridorbusiness.com/data-centers-bringing-big-numbe...
[1] https://www.pa.gov/content/dam/copapwp-pagov/en/dli/document...
2 replies →
> I was sure you were exaggerating. But no!
What? Me exaggerate? Never! :-) I did actually spend a minute looking for the commercial on YouTube but YT search sucks, so thanks for finding it. Setting aside the fact it's crassly manipulative corporate propaganda, as someone with a lot of film and video production experience, the production team that made it did very nice work. That's the only reason I actually ever even saw it. I normally skip through all commercials on the DVR, but I happened land on a couple of really nicely shot frames as I was skipping and rewound to see the spot. I thought, "Wow, blatant bullshit but great work!" :-)
I'm chuckling at the comments for the video:
"If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built..."