Comment by parpfish
9 hours ago
Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development
9 hours ago
Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development
That's exactly the issue. The jobs are front-loaded in construction. Once operational, a massive data center might only employ 30-50 high-skill technicians.
Compared to a factory of the same square footage that might employ 500+ people, the 'jobs per megawatt' ratio is terrible. It's essentially renting out the local power grid to a remote entity, not creating a local economy.
Unlike enterprise datacenters, systems inside these datacenters are tightly coupled to compute system design to eke out PUE, so network cabling, electrical, and cooling to a lesser degree gets reworked every 3-5 years. On a campus with several data halls this means that there’s work for those trades well beyond initial construction. Sure, you don’t have the steel and concrete work happening that went into the shell, but it’s more than a handful of operations people.
From the 00s to mid 2010s I did fiber splicing in factories from Kenosha to Beaver Dam and even then they were fairly well-automated to the extent that I’d see just a few people on the factory floor moving carts of metal between machines or handling shipping and receiving.
They bring in temporary construction jobs but once running they provide no meaningful jobs.
If we just want to front load a bunch of construction jobs, I vote for some megalithic stone structures.
Let’s give something to the archeologists 5,000 years in the future.
Aside from the initial construction, you need a few shifts of dc techs (for remote hands, running data cables, escorting vendors), electricians, and security. Not much else really needs to be done onsite.
You might have an electrical engineer on staff for planning and management but most of the actual work (and plumbing, HVAC) will be contractors hired as needed.
They neither directly create many long-term jobs or use copious amounts of water.
If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all.
If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman.
I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.
> use copious amounts of water.
If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months.
On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water.
Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.
> If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves.
I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People have been committing suicide off google searches for years. There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems like a fragile argument made by people who dislike LLMs for other reasons
Propaganda? Did people kill themselves at the direction of an LLM or not?
That's like saying ICE outrage is propaganda, and is, at best, insulting to the memory of those lost.
Brushing this point off seems more like propaganda than acknowledging it does.
LLMs are neat tools. They can do some neat things. Dynamite is also pretty cool, and it can do some neat things. How many more people need to get "blown up" by LLMs before we un-brainwash ourselves? At least one more I guess.
3 replies →