The AI data-centre boom is a job-creation bust
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The AI boom has sparked a surge in new data centers. In Abilene, Texas, some 1,500 people are building the first data center for the Stargate artificial-intelligence venture led by OpenAI.
Once it is completed, a lot fewer people will work there. The facility will have about 100 full-time employees, according to the city’s economic development agency. That total is a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same one million square feet if it were an office park, factory or warehouse.
A 286,500-square-foot cheese-packaging plant that broke ground in Abilene in 2021 was projected to employ 500 people. “Data centers have rightly earned a dismal reputation of creating the lowest number of jobs per square foot in their facilities" said John Johnson, chief executive of data-center operator Patmos Hosting. Silicon Valley’s race to build advanced AI systems has sparked a related frenzy to build data centers with the chips needed to power them.
Tech companies including Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft operate 445 data centers in the U.S. and have 249 in the pipeline, according to Synergy Research Group. Stargate plans to build at least 20.
Their spending totals hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Politicians and business leaders have touted data centers as a boon for employment. At the press conference unveiling Stargate, President Trump said more than 100,000 new jobs would be created “almost immediately." OpenAI published a blog post that said Stargate would “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs." The reality is data centers can employ more than 1,000 people in the several months or years it takes to build them, but rarely need more than one or two hundred once
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