The data centers were coming. Rural Washington, USA, was going to be transformed. There would be so many jobs, so many jobs. Making Rural Washington Great Again. All it required was cheap land, cheap water, cheap electricity, and huge tax breaks. The data centers came. Where were the jobs, people asked? The government would not say. Refused to say. Top secret. Trade secret. Can’t tell. The public must never know what happened behind those closed doors, when the government officials and data center executives commingled and whispered sweet nothings into each other’s ears.

Data centers truly suck when it comes to job creation, as they are highly automated environments that become more automated every year. Because of the crazy situation of tax breaks for data centers in the USA and other countries, it’s hard to see how any of this makes sense. It shows how powerful Big Tech is, that it can demand and get tax breaks in a situation where it makes absolutely no sense—from a citizen perspective—to give them such corporate welfare. “Tax breaks for data centers are a fortunately rare phenomenon—tax policy that is precisely wrong,” Andrew Leahey wrote for Bloomberg in 2024. “They represent misguided state fiscal strategy, and the tide must be stemmed before more states succumb to the mistaken notion of ‘investing’ in data centers with taxpayer money.” It’s a con. A con.

A typical data center is designed to last 15 to 20 years. Even large ones can have no more than four to five people working there at a time, “ensuring that workers were alone most of their shifts,” professors Mayer and Julia Velkova wrote for The Information Society. Work is tedious, dull and isolating. Job security is weak. There is constant talk of further automation. “People are afraid,” the research authors were told by the workers. Some hope that they might get to finish their careers because “we are much cheaper than the robots.”

A Google data center job costs hundreds of times more in electricity than an average Norwegian job, for example. Google came to the country demanding 5% of its electricity, while promising about 100 jobs. The local and national politicians thought it was a fantastic deal. For the remaining 95% of electricity, Norway was getting three million jobs. The numbers don’t add up, do they? Those that do the total cost calculations find that with the tax breaks and subsidies—let’s not even consider the environmental costs—these data centers are a big rip off, a con. Why? Big Tech playing one country off against another, playing one region off against another.

Data centers often exploit the desperation of “developing” countries or of poor, rural areas in developed ones, promising those magical jobs that never appear. “Employment in data centres are high value jobs,” Irish government propaganda has stated in one of its truly cringeworthy and embarrassing data center policy papers. Sorry, no. You have more security guards in typical data center than technicians. Technical jobs are basic and involve shift work. And any good jobs, they fly them in for the day from headquarters.

In the USA, it was estimated that data centers delivered 5 to 10 jobs per acre, whereas other employers delivered about 50 jobs per acre. A city north of Paris calculated that the employment rate for a data center in the area was one full-time employee per 10,000 square meters, when the average in the area was 50. Almost every day you can read a story about a data center planning to build on 130 acres of land, promising 15 to 30 jobs.

Not delivering jobs is actually a good thing, according to the Data Center Coalition. Who wants those silly jobs, anyway? “Not having lots of workers driving to and from data centers saves localities from having to pay for roads, emergency services and schools,” the Coalition said, with a smile. A mega Facebook data center was employing about 400 workers, while a similar sized Mall of America was employing 11,000 people: 28 times more staff. In Sweden, when Facebook announced a data center plan, the country’s business propaganda machine went into overdrive, promising 30,000 jobs from the new industry. Facebook initially delivered 56 jobs, rising to an almighty 90, while using as much electricity as a town of 27,000 inhabitants. A typical data center provides 10% of the jobs of other industries while consuming 10 to 50 times the amount of electricity and who knows how much water. So, a handful of people can be running a data center that’s consuming as much electricity as a small city. In Ireland, by the early 2020s, data centers were employing less than 1% of the workforce, while using more than 20% of the electricity.

Tax Breaks for Data Centers Are Exactly Wrong, Andrew Leahey, Bloomberg, 2024
This site is a dead end? Employment uncertainties and labor in data centers, Vicki Mayer, Julia Velkova, The Information Society, 2023