We studied 1,500-plus data centers over 23 years and found they created almost no new jobs in local stores or restaurants — it was somewhere else
Source: Fortune ·
Data centers themselves directly create a few dozen jobs each, then about 1,000 in the local economy after a delay of several years.
From the source
Data centers require enormous investments: land, buildings, computer equipment and power infrastructure. Yet, once they’re up and running, they tend to employ no more than a few dozen people in occupations such as IT technicians, engineers and security guards. With billions of dollars flowing into new data centers across the United States, communities are asking what they will get in return. Skepticism about the local benefits of data centers is contributing to growing opposition to their construction, from Ohio to Texas. That pushback contributed to delays or cancellations of US$156 billion in proposed data center projects in 2025 alone. We are professors who study real estate and urban economics, including how large place-based investments shape local economies. So we set out to answer a question at the center of these fights: Do data centers actually create jobs where they are built? To find out, we teamed up with four colleagues to study what happens to local employment after…