How many more jobs are there at the aluminum plant than a datacenter? Big datacenters employ mid-hundreds of people
Re:Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI
by 3eb7988a1663 on Friday December 26, 2025 @12:29PM
(#46394166)
Not only would I suspect that an aluminum plant employs far more people, it is an attainable job. Presumably minimal qualifications for some menial tasks, whereas you might need a certain level of education/training to get a more prestigious and out of reach job at a datacenter.
Easier for a politician to latch onto manufacturing jobs.
I'm pretty sure both the plant and the DC have both "menial" jobs and highly-skilled jobs.
You don't just chuck ore into a furnace and wait for a few seconds in reality.
Re:Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI
by 3eb7988a1663 on Friday December 26, 2025 @01:43PM
(#46394890)
No doubt there is exquisite engineering and process control expertise required to operate an aluminum plant. However, I imagine there is extensive need for people to "man the bellows", move this X tons from here to there, etc that require only minimal training and a clean drug test. An army of labor vs a handful of nerds to swap failed hard drives.
AFAIK, the data center employs more people. I'm not really sure why that's the case, but neither is >1k.
I'd guess that this is also an area where the perception makes a bigger difference than the reality.
Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW.
Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem!
This is an all too common pattern.