>Yes it's a huge job creation/economics boon as well

Is it though? Maybe the construction itself but after that running a data center doesn't need that many on-premise people, like it can be in the two digit range which is not a lot at all. And even then on-premise people won't be the highest paid engineer jobs but rather security and technicians.

Two digit range is a lot of people in a rural area with a couple thousand residents. That's probably a double digit % increase in jobs in that community.

The actual issue is that they don't. A 100 MW steel mill might employ ~1000 people and contribute ~$1 billion/year to the economy. A 100 MW data center doesn't need that many people even during construction, and its economic contributions are attributed to the location of corporate offices. As far as local people are concerned, any other use for the electricity would be more valuable than a remotely owned data center.

Got any examples of 100 MW steel mills and 100 MW Datacenters that you are comparing here? Would love to see some real side by sides if you actually have any data?

I took the steel mill example from a comparison I made in a Finnish context. Outokumpu's steel mill in Tornio employs ~2000 people directly, plus an unknown number of subcontractors. Its revenues have varied between €3.5 billion/year and €7 billion/year recently, and its average power consumption is ~400 MW.

Nebius is currently building a 310 MW data center in Lappeenranta. The construction phase employs ~700 people, and the finished data center is expected to have ~100 employees.

Yeah well they aren't building steel mills in rural Texas/Louisiana/etc so this is what we have to work with.

Well, it's arguably making things worse in rural Texas/Louisiana/etc., so I don't blame them for not wanting the data centers.

Understand that if the data center developers had not been so cartoonishly exploitative in their deal making in these municipalities nationwide, there really wouldn't be that much pushback. NIMBY stuff ultimately gets built all the time, usually because the money offered is just too good. Instead of using their massive amounts of capital, they struck backroom deals with local politicians to get tax credits, pass along infrastructure costs to other parties, and otherwise financially burden the community.

They had the money to go in and do all of this stuff without involving the public beyond the usual permitting processes; they just thought themselves too important to be burdened with having to spend money to make money. It's the "cult of the founder" mindset in action at the infrastructure policy level.

It is actually terrible at job creation. Data centers don't create many jobs at all, and you could argue through second and third order effects that they are job destroyers.

Data centers simply don't require very many people to operate.

Job destroyers where? Maybe in the glass towers of NYC and SF and elsewhere. Creating even a few dozen jobs in rural communities is a massive improvement and boost to the local economy.

Datacenters certainly provide many construction jobs during that phase of the project.

During normal operations though, you would have a handful of technicians, probably a facilities manager and frequent contractor visits, probably onsite security.

The facilities contractors may come from far away for maintenance projects, so maybe you help support local hospitality businesses.

Most of the highly paid work at the datacenter will happen remotely.

Every so often, there will be a hardware refresh, but you probably bring in people from elsewhere to do those, if it doesn't make sense to have the onsite techs do it little by little.

Certainly, there's a lot of equipment installed, and any locality with property tax on business equipment should get value from that. But otherwise, almost any other light industrial business would have more employees.

Go check out how many people live in some of these places and how many jobs there are. Even 20 additional tech jobs is a massive boost to these areas.

The construction jobs are likely not local but migrant construction workers. The restaurants and hotels my see a bump during construction.

I'm guessing DHS won't be conducting any ICE raids if it's a data center.

Maybe itinerant workers would be better term

You say so. All I know is rent nearly doubled in my area as soon as construction on the data center began. If that's a what a boon to the economy looks like, I'm not interested.