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Comment by iijaachok | Hacker News Reader

You're conflating AI and AI Data centres. What kind of "jobs" does AI data centre creates? More jobs for factory workers who assemble video cards to be shipped and installed in a rack?

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I think OP is talking about the downstream implications of productivity growth. Which is still yet hypothetical.

AI is designed to funnel productivity growth away from workers (less labor, downward pressure on remaining jobs) and to shareholders

so not only is it hypothetical but if it becomes a reality (which seems probable), it is highly destructive to the average person

The downstream portion isn't proven, and more importantly, even if it was, it's not localized to where the data center is built (and its effect on the local population).

Data centers require lots of technicians to install, maintain, and decommission servers. Who do you think installs those video cards?

How many technicians? And from where? Its unclear to me how often this stuff actually needs to be done. And how resilient the overall system is to failure. Is it imperative to swap out one point of failure immediately or can you let them batch up and send Joe from California out qaurterly?

Technicians are constantly behind in work. Many data centers are pulling 24/7/365 shifts to keep up with demand. Larger data centers have hundreds of full time employees.

Yes many servers are left in fail over states for long periods of time, but that can only be done because new capacity is actively being deployed to make up for that fail over. Modern data centers are far too big for a single person to be repairing things every once in a while. Stuff is breaking every hour of every day

Thanks for the info. So the technicians are there on site daily? dozens? hundreds?

Im not too surprised there is quite a bit to replace. Sure the failure rate should be low but the scale is massive. Its interesting to get an order of magnitude though. Every hour is more frequent than I thought.

100-200 FTE's per data center by one estimate.

I have let's say 17 data centers being built in my town. 1700 jobs is not enough according to the people in opposition. The real number is likely higher, and my town is under 30k people.

Its not just quantity of jobs though. Are the jobs going to locals? Are the technicians coming from some small town that was chosen for the economics of building and runnign the datacenter? It seems fairly likely they would pick a small town that doesnt really have the knowledge base to serve as technicians. I mean it would be cool if they hired local.

There is training programs for this kind of stuff in the local universities which are an hour or less drive away. I would agree, there probably isn't too many people in town with the skills - probably lots of people will move to town.

I worked for a company that ran a pretty big, high-security data center--75,000 square feet serving thousands of customers. There was a team of 6-8 technicians and a couple dozen security guards. None of them were particularly great or high-paying jobs.

These were the same promises crypto mining operations were making, hearing them again so soon will leave a lot of people skeptical.

Data centers don't grow on trees.

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