"a great site" -- you frame it like Microsoft was working for the public good

Building a datacenter typically employs thousands of people in the trades, often for hundreds or a thousand plus hours, per person, from the start of a big build to the campus being complete. It’s quite literally millions of billable hours in trade labor.

Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.

It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.

It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.

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SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There are a lot of jobs during construction.

There are very few jobs during operation. Mostly site security and a few tech support staff. There will be some steady work for maintenance contractors, but that's much less than the initial construction.

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nixgeek 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, you’re right, but when the alternative is all that investment and those construction jobs AND the post-commissioning operational jobs go to a different community and a different economy, …

What would you prefer? To me, local communities tend to benefit in multiple different ways during and after these projects, poorer communities become richer, communities with little opportunity now have more opportunity. I’m always a bit baffled by someone saying “Please don’t invest $5B and create 100s of jobs and taxable improvements in my back yard”.

This is a common argument: wanting 1000s of jobs during construction and 1000s of jobs after construction, but this isn’t a car manufacturing plant. That’s a “we want our cake and we want to eat it too” argument — not saying it’s your argument just that this comes up frequently.

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SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But what often happens is that the company is granted a ten year tax abatement in exchange for the jobs, the jobs end up being fewer than promised, and then in ten years the company closes the site and now the community has an empty industrial brownfield that was built for one thing and can't be easily repurposed.

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jeffbee 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It makes more sense when you realize that the same people also don't want anyone new living in their town, so they do not perceive any value to new jobs, only costs.

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Danox 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the last stand for Satya Narayana Nadella Copilot has to work…