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.

> 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.

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.

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

Many jobs during construction. A site like this is a substantial multi-year construction effort.

Long term permanent jobs.. not so much.

It’d be a lot easier to argue that a railroad yard is a necessary part of a datacenter, and then eminent domain and pave it :)

But there’s some sensible planning in linking datacenters and railroads, honestly. Truck-shipping 44U fully-loaded cargo racks in standardized quarter-containers would a lot more sense in today’s AI-proliferation context. And I’d be up for seeing datacenters lose their natural lock-in resistance to customer migrations; “a competitor offered us a 5% discount plus freight refunds if we shift at least 5 cars of racks to them” is a lot easier when your datacenter has cargo crane capacity. There’s still a place for bespoke DCs but for the cog-in-the-cloud stuff that we have now, it’s not a bad idea!

(And, if you add a third rail for power-over-Ethernet, then you can start to have datacenter migrations that don’t cause an outage. Amtrak is already implementing the first stages of datacenter-grade connectivity for riders on their trains, though not amperes of the necessary degree yet.)

A railroad has to track a lot of data; what's in each car (declared by customer), what train it's attached to, where is it on maintenance schedules; similar for the rail and signal infrastructure, etc; in today's modern environment, they need multiple datacenters for high availability.

Something something route planning to reduce the number of coupling changes, etc, etc.

Edit: also, a lot of long distance fiber runs on railroad right of way, so datacenters at rail yards may be well placed for connectivity.

Snowpiercer but with data centers? The breeze would help with cooling!

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Technically, it creates construction revenue and jobs. If you’re a municipality with FOMO heading into a job-collapse recession and someone offers you jobs on a silver platter, you might get fired from the city council for refusing it. So it’s particularly interesting to see that citizens would rather refuse datacenters than gain from them. (I certainly agree.)

> and it increases electricity costs for the region

This doesn't need to be true, because increasing costs for others is not an inherent property of adding new electricity consumers. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.

I think that they hear "$6 billion datacenter" and think that the town's economy is getting $6 billion in jobs rather than some foreign computer hardware company is getting $6B for computers that are housed in their town.

A few steak dinners go a long way.

> increases electricity costs for the region

This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.

But "region" is doing a lot of work here. This is typically a multi-state sized region. There are local congestion charges in some places, but overall it doesn't matter a whole lot to your electric bill if a large consumer goes in 200 miles away or across the road from you.

If it goes in across the road your local community gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible. After construction there is very little truck traffic (e.g. much less wear and tear on local roads than a trucking terminal or manufacturing plant), and effectively is a giant office building in terms of impact on it's surroundings. In fact, until recently most of the datacenters were built in suburban office and light industrial parks and no one was the wiser.

There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.

It's effectively as "free" of a tax base as you can get, assuming you don't negotiate stupid local tax abatements - which I suppose is a large caveat. Those should be simply outright illegal for everyone though, I don't see that as a datacenter specific thing. It also does effectively employ a few dozen to few hundred local tradesmen through the lifecycle of such a facility - since at these scales there is constant electric and plumbing work to be done. Usually the highest paid and highly skilled of such type of work. Many (most?) places are even using union labor for these bits.

The power problem exists broadly though. We spent a few generations not building out anything of material size and we are reaping what we have sewn. It was coming for us either way - datacenter AI bubble just brought it forward a some odd number of years. Just look at how hard it is to get a wind farm project off the ground due to NIMBY - both for the wind farm itself, and the 200 mile transmission line you might need to build to the closest major load centers. Effectively impossible.

It's the second thing

NIMBYism comes in all colors

Red states are against the deals as well. Many people in Texas are fighting back but sometimes it’s too late because the deal was done in secret.

This is 100% not a political issue, red & blue are lining up against DCs. the DC capital of the world is Northern Virginia which is bluer than Bernie

And why is that?

I'd say having your house fall to a third of its value while your electricity bill triples is a perfectly rational argument for opposing a data center. If the data center is that valuable, pay the residents current market value for their property and give them a million dollars to uproot their life. Letting giant corporations impose massive costs on the folks that don't have the money to buy politicians is not an efficient outcome.

Props to these folks for protecting their community. Maybe they can build the data center in your backyard instead :).

Datacentres aren't mills. Mills employed hundreds of people and mill owners invested in property to house the workforce in the local area.

Data centres are mostly ran remotely, employing a handful of people to watch a fence line.