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Comment by dukeyukey | Hacker News Reader

The services provided by a data center do provide jobs. My job for one, and I'm guessing a majority of posters here too.

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But thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, most of those jobs don't have to be in the city, region, or even the same country as the one where the DC is located. So for a local politician, most of those jobs won't get them reelected.

I realise it's a politically hard sell, but it's just a lie that data centers produce few jobs. Few direct jobs, sure, but the internet and cloud existing has created many, many millions of jobs.

Normal datacentres, sure, but these services are already running from the existing datacentres.

These purpose built DCs in the recent AI craze doesn't. A handful of security guys, handful of technicians and that's pretty much it

they said "that many jobs" not "no jobs".

compared to something like a car factory, data centers do not provide that many jobs.

(and the jobs are of significantly different nature)

Directly, sure. Indirectly, they have created many millions of jobs. Tens of millions at the very lowest. There are nearly 30 million web developers alone.

the problem is that many of those jobs often aren't in the locale. by necessity, car factory workers work, live, spend money, and pay taxes in the same general area as the car factory. that does not hold true for web developers (which may be in entirely different countries).

I recognise that makes it politically tricky, but "creates almost no jobs" and "creates lots of jobs, but dispersed elsewhere" are two very different statements. And for data centers the latter is true, and the former is a lie.

As long as we don't see the damaged areas around data centers than all is fine, right?

Where have I heard this before?

What damage?

What damage do you have in mind? I live next to a big cluster of data centers, second biggest in Europe, and I haven't seen anything like "damage" from them.

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