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> Missouri campaign finance records show a political action committee — made up of labor unions that support data centers because of the jobs they create — spen

• nixass 6mo ago
  > Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents? If locals are qualified then yes. The DC itself does not have many permanent staff (tech, facilities, security) but loads of work is contracted. I'd say that great majority of the work done in and around the DC campus is outsourced, and it creates work for plenty of people.
  • bdangubic 6mo ago
    to build - yes. after it is built - no. so there is some temporary work but nothing permanent
    • dilyevsky 6mo ago
      At least when i was at google, more than a decades ago at this point, hardware ops guys were locally sourced
      • rkomorn 6mo ago
        When I was at (then) Facebook, this was mostly the case, but we also ran data centers with a hundred thousands of servers off a dozen local techs. Facebook (and Google as well, IIRC) prided themselves on how few people they needed to run the datacenter. Maybe I'm jaded but "we created 50 jobs" just doesn't hit that hard.
        • dilyevsky 6mo ago
          I mean it’s a warehouse sized building, unless you’re doing a call center boiler room in there how many more jobs you’d expect?
          • rkomorn 6mo ago
            Me? Not many, but I also happened to work in adjacent roles that had me more informed than the average engineer. People whose communities are affected? I think it'd be reasonable for them to expect more for it to be worth it.
            • dilyevsky 6mo ago
              What are they giving up? You get property tax revenue, permit revenue, some construction trickle down, and you do get a few dozen jobs and in return you give up some some grandstanding/political posturing opportunities. Seems like an easy deal to me, but hey that's just me.
    • nixass 6mo ago
      You're wrong. People are probably impressed by the dollar value number it takes to build a DC/campus and then expect that the number of hired people should be "proportionally" equally high. It doesn't work like that but DCs definitely create more than enough local jobs for qualified even after it's built
      • dilyevsky 6mo ago
        This. At least until we’re at a point where some guy in the Philippines operates a telepresence android this is definitely a net gain for the community.
      • soco 6mo ago
        I'll repeat a question asked somewhere else: what exactly are those local jobs after it's built? Can somebody care to list?
        • phil21 6mo ago
          Electricians. Top skilled folks for the most part who can do industrial level conduit work and the type who can operate switching gear and control systems. There is enough of this ongoing work for these huge facilities to effectively employ a half dozen full time contractors or more. One of the facilities I work the most in has electrical contractors on-site every single day, with at least a few trucks in the parking lot. These are local union guys. Always something breaking, needing maintenance, or a new area of the facility being refreshed. The facility is over a decade old and the work has never slowed down. Plumbers. Cooling these facilities takes vast amounts of plumbing work. And it's also typically some of the highest skilled plumbing needed outside of refinery and other manufacturing plant work. When you have 50 giant chillers running 24x7 at least one is undergoing some form of maintenance at any given time. Probably overlapping with the above, but HVAC technicians. Again, the scale of these facilities means constant work being available as you are operating at miniature city sized installations. Security guards of course. Not really material though. I've noticed more armed guards than before, with at least two on duty 24x7. As these places get more controversial, I imagine this sort of staffing will increase. On-site (IT) technicians. For facilities these sizes, you will be staffing it 24x7 and have a large enough crew to get basic refresh projects done. Hard to really estimate this, but in the dozens of full time labor for these giant projects. Think folks who can pull cable, troubleshoot basic hardware, swap drives/bad RAM sticks, etc. For the larger refresh projects contractors typically get flown in during a surge so on-site staffing is relatively minimal, but very few facilities are operating "lights out". Then you have facility management - highly skilled positions that know how to operate all the electric/mechanical and cooling equipment during emergencies. Every facility I've worked in is staffed by a crew of around half a dozen of these folks or so, with the top tier subject matter experts being flown in during critical emergencies. These are the guys generally coordinating all the contract labor above. Probably a couple mid-tier network engineers and higher skilled sysadmin types as well depending on who is operating it. Everyone loves to pretend these are highly automated and copy/paste facilities hyperscalers are just perfect at executing - but there is a lot of "dirty" hands-on work to be done since that stuff is not nearly as perfect as advertised and often requires hands-on problem solving and on the spot hacks to get stuff going. As anywhere, how the sausage gets made is a lot uglier than the marketing. Once you get out of the highly competent hyperscalers, the above numbers go way up. Enterprise datacenter operators are going to need far more on-site labor due to simply not being great at this sort of work. The stories I hear of some current builds are rather humorous in how many people it's taking to get stuff working - basically solving what should be automated via manual processes. It's not a lot of jobs, but for these huge 100's of Megawatt facilities the low-end is probably in the 100+ range of FTE equivalent labor after construction is completed. Everyone but security and the basic "remote hands" type employees would be in the $100k+ salary range.
    • polski-g 6mo ago
      There will be at least 5 employees working as smart hands 24/7, so probably 3 shifts -- 15 people. Plus 1-2 security agents working 24/7, another 6 jobs. Plus a foreman with some maintenance crew for HVAC/electrical (not 24/7) so probably another 1-3 jobs. That's a really sweet deal for a town with only 11k people and no other external investments on the horizon.
  • jnovek 6mo ago
    Are you talking about contractors just while the DC is under construction or after it’s built as well? Google wants to build one in my home town and I’m questioning what value it will bring to the community.
  • jagged-chisel 6mo ago
    It doesn't create ongoing jobs. It creates short term work, and perhaps the occasional momentary task. The only permanent jobs will be physical security.
    • Rekindle8090 6mo ago
      What do you think people working in construction actually do when the project is done? Just spend the rest of their life homeless? No, they go to the next project.
      • pwg 6mo ago
        The problem is that when the lobbyists are pitching these builds to the local town councils, the "create X jobs" part of the marketing is very carefully worded to heavily imply "X long term jobs will be created" while also not actually directly saying "X long term jobs will be created". They want the council members thinking X long term jobs, but want to avoid legal liability for lying later when the reality of X was 99% temporary jobs lasting 6-12 months and 1% long term jobs for the community. And few council members seem to have been snookered enough yet that they know to ask the marketing lobbyist the pointed question: "How many of those X jobs are long term and will persist after construction and build-out is completed?".
• pwg 6mo ago
  A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.). A small number of jobs for security guards. Maybe a tiny number (one to three?) for individuals tasked with actual hardware swapping within the data center itself. And all of the above assumes the data center owner does not "travel in" the requisite individuals on an "as needed" basis -- in which case the only jobs that may go to the locals is "security guard". But all of the "sys-admin" management level work can be done remotely. So the actual number of new jobs that arrive in the locality is likely on the order of 20-30 or fewer.
  • SteveNuts 6mo ago
    Yeah and that type of work bid usually goes to huge conglomerates. A local mom and pop electrician shop isn’t going to be building a datacenter, it’ll be something like Siemens.
    • uberduper 6mo ago
      Local shops will absolutely be contracted to work on the project. A datacenter project like this can't find enough qualified electricians.
      • pseudohadamard 6mo ago
        I would imagine there aren't too many electricians in Yeehaw, Minnesota, trained and qualified to do gigawatt data center installs. So they'll freight in contractors to do that work, and maybe temporarily employ a few locals for a month or two for auxiliary stuff. More generally, this is the universal playbook when someone wants to dump some megaproject on a community that doesn't want it: This will create X jobs and inject $Y into the local economy. Can you name one case where this actually happened? It's usually very few additional permanent jobs and, particularly for public-works stuff, millions or even billions in extra debt to pay off. But don't worry, this next thing we're working on once we get the local council to issue a permit to bulldoze your forest park, that will bring in jobs, we promise.
    • EvanAnderson 6mo ago
• uberduper 6mo ago
  Many jobs during construction. A site like this is a substantial multi-year construction effort. Long term permanent jobs.. not so much.
  • cestith 6mo ago
    A few dozen jobs in a town of 12,000 is nothing to sneeze at.
• jdubs1984 6mo ago
  In a town of 12K people I'd say it's incredibly unlikely. Most of if not all the labor to build it will be flown in, most of the labor to staff it will be moved in. And once it's built it's not like a Walmart or something where you need enough staff to police the crowds...there are not crowds. There's some rack and stack needs, and some ongoing cabling needs generally,and some other stuff, but they are staffed as lightly as humanly possible. I suppose w/ all the out of town labor to build it there will be more waitress and hotel cleaning jobs for a while...a town or over...where they can actually house the labor. Oh, and they are getting an Olive Garden...which will probably employ more local labor.
  • cestith 6mo ago
    Festus isn’t small because it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s right there with Arnold, Barnhart, Crystal City, and other far south suburbs of St. Louis. The metro area can build it. It’s not like Boeing brings in remote labor from around the country every time they build an F-15.
  • dzhiurgis 6mo ago
    > And once it's built it's not like a Walmart Yet it creates infinitely more value than a supermarket.
• dgllghr 6mo ago
  As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, there are definitely ongoing jobs, but in this area they are mostly filled with H1B workers. The real money is in development
• altairprime 6mo ago
  Almost none. Its entire value is in one-time construction regional purchasing and the ability to say the word “jobs” to the cameras. Occasionally they have the guts to charge market rates for resources or taxes but for the most part that’s heavily discounted. (See also e.g. The Dalles’ attempt to secretly sell much of its watershed to datacenters.)
• hahahacorn 6mo ago
  It will raise $8-$18m/yr in property tax revenue for the county (depending on abatements), which will likely increase the local counties revenues by 30-50% and primarily go towards local schools, as well as an estimated 50-150 jobs. If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity, it's an extremely low environmental & industrial (all contained clean rooms, no air pollutants, risk to local water systems, etc.) once in a lifetime boon for the local municipality. The council members (probably, again depending on abatements & water/energy policy) did represent their constituents well.
  • LargeWu 6mo ago
    "If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity..." This assertion is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, and when it isn't true, it can cause huge externalities not just for the local community but possibly an entire region. It also does not address the noise problem. Additionally, your jobs estimates are likely high and include short-term construction jobs which may not even go to locals anyway.
    • disillusioned 6mo ago
      "Pay for their own electricity" is just not an actual thing that seems to be doable at this scale without those externalities. You're talking about sites that are, say, 800MW or 1GW or more... these use more power than tens of thousands of homes, and require entirely new power plants, interconnects, lines run, transformer costs, staff, etc. Typically, power companies amortize those costs and spread them over ratepayers, and when it's just part of the normal induced load of population growth, that's just how things go, and the system works. In these cases, the rates that these DCs are paying for power are nowhere close to being able to fully absorb or offset the additional CapEx that the power companies are suddenly tasked with, even if they put up, say, the capital for IC, which is usually what's required. So the remaining new shortfalls get spread over the remaining ratepayers, ie, everyone else. If the demand wasn't induced by the build of these massive sites that, strictly speaking, aren't "necessary," then the rates wouldn't have to climb to accommodate them. Frankly, there should be laws against power companies raising ratepayer rates to accommodate infrastructure investments driven solely by DC/fab load inducement.
• kjs3 6mo ago
  According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce[1], 1688 while being built, 157 on-going jobs. I assume this is some 'average' datacenter; I didn't pursue methodology. [1] https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/ctec_datacenterrpt_lowres.pdf https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/ctec_datacenterrp...