According to Data Center Knowledge:
Data center employment often comes up in discussions of economic development. Many communities are eager to attract data center projects, but struggle to define the economic benefits of these facilities. Jobs have always been the primary benchmark by which economic development projects are measured. Incentive packages offered by state and local governments are often based on the number of full-time jobs created by a new business.
This model doesn't work out well for data centers, which are typically highly automated, allowing a small number of workers to operate a large facility. A new data center can bring a large capital investment into a town, but create a much smaller number of jobs than a factory or office property of a similar size.
Apparently a typical data centre (e.g. one of Google's) employs less than 200 people and sometimes around tenth of that amount.
Apart from a few hi-tech 'knowledge worker' jobs probably not recruited locally, the main job benefit is likely to be for cleaners and only a few of them at that.
So the news that BlackRock is set to announce a £500 million investment in UK data centres means very little.
These data centres:
- Won't create large numbers of jobs for their local communities
- Will be built on land that would be better used for housing and other infrastructure projects to benefit local communities
- Will drain lots of power from the grid and probably at rock-bottom energy rates compared to what local consumers will pay
- Will generate lots of income for the US technology companies that supply the bulk of the hardware used in the centres
- Will be targeted for destruction/disruption in the event of any military/cyber threat to the UK
- Will produce nothing but could be used to harvest data from and oppress UK citizens without their explicit knowledge
So what exactly is the benefit to UK taxpayers of these much-vaunted data centre investments?