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Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

If most of the jobs its creating are related to construction of infrastructure then that's not really positive news as these jobs are temporary, once demand settles then why kind of jobs are going to be created?

It might be benefiting other areas, but I think as the technology improves a lot of those are going to start looking like what's happening in software development (which is arguably what the technology is best at right now).

So yeah, idk.

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Most of these jobs are the same jobs that arose thanks to the CHIPS and IRA. Much of the AI boom and trade is building on top of the capex that arose from the semiconductor/hardware portfolio during that era.

Many of the current DCs being built out are also being powered or tied with renewable energy projects that were funded by the IRA, as many DC builders with deep pockets do know the political dimension. If this is what keeps the CHIPS, IRA, and the IIJA alive I'm happy.

Every industry and career type goes through ebbs and flows. The 2010s was a white collar boom, and the 2020s is now a white collar bust. Meanwhile the 2010s was a skilled trades bust and the 2020s is now a skilled trades boom.

Skilled trade still isn't paying either.

AI construction jobs are temporary up to Kardashev 3 or so.

Humans become irrelevant well before then.

But it will be automated long before then

We not gonna make it to level 1, bro

Isn't this true for "all" construction? Nobody says,

"The housing construction jobs are temporary, we shouldn't count them."

There will always be CapEx to spend.

People say this all the time and it's a huge issue. A main driver of current housing issues is that no one wants to over scale and have too many temporary jobs that disappear if housing demand slows down.

Datacenter construction jobs though are very very temporary and not really the kind of thing where we can keep building for no reason and then just tear down to rebuild again.

The reason we have so many "infrastructure" bills that are basically just build more roads is that there are so many temporary road construction jobs. If they don't keep building and those workers lose their jobs it's going to be a major crisis.

"Datacenter construction jobs though are very very temporary"

They are 5-6 year long builds with full support of the unions[1], let's just put this all aside. The jobs are good. Most people citing narratives around "what's the point of doing anything if the jobs are temporary" are people who don't have those jobs.

[1]: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/building-trade-...

There is almost always a next big thing. What happens when it ends is people move to the next thing. Practically everything needs some kind of construction, management, software, hardware, etc.

I'd be rich if I knew what the next big thing was but the economy has been running on the assumption that there will be a next big thing for many, many decades. Each cycle has the same rhymes of "what happens when it ends" questions but there has always something.

Everything is temporary, especially jobs.

insightful

I worked in a country for 10+ years where the economy was not that good. The only place with true guaranteed continuous employment are government services or adjacents. Anywhere else you would see layoffs, closures or salary stagnation.

The construction jobs are only temporary if the compute infrastructure build-out decelerates. That seems pretty unlikely in the mid-term! It would mean that, like, there's a fixed appetite for data centers, and once we satisfy that appetite, we stop building them.

For better or worse, it looks more like that we're gonna tile the whole damn planet in data centers, at a faster and faster clip.

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