Comment by insuranceguru
9 hours ago
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.