The AI data-center boom is a job-creation bust

In Abilene, Texas, some 1,500 people are building the first data center for the Stargate artificial-intelligence venture led by OpenAI.

- Tom Dotan

Once it is completed, a lot fewer people will work there. The facility will have about 100 full-time employees, according to the city's economic development agency. That total is a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same one million square feet if it were an office park, factory or warehouse.

A 286,500-square-foot cheese-packaging plant that broke ground in Abilene in 2021 was projected to employ 500 people.

"Data centers have rightly earned a dismal reputation of creating the lowest number of jobs per square foot in their facilities" said John Johnson, chief executive of data-center operator Patmos Hosting.

Silicon Valley's race to build advanced AI systems has sparked a related frenzy to build data centers with the chips needed to power them. Tech companies including Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft operate 445 data centers in the U.S. and have 249 in the pipeline, according to Synergy Research Group. Stargate plans to build at least 20. Their spending totals hundreds of billions of dollars annually.