Why Do Data Centers Create So Few Jobs?

Ben Affleck says he heard Chamath, someone he has known for a long time, say something he thought was pretty smart. He retells the point: people told they are sharing in the value of new development cannot be left with a theoretical future promise. Carnegie and Rockefeller built museums and parks. The railroads were an evident public good, and money also went into the communities around them. Neighbors will embrace data centers only when a benefit is evident with a data center in the backyard. Otherwise they will say a builder is going to spend all the money, create 200 jobs, and leave them staring at a giant concrete square stuck in the water and the power.

The water line after that exchange is his own, and he never finishes the criticism. He calls the water thing a little bit of a, then says the setup is really a sort of closed loop water system. He does say the buildings are electrically very taxing and take a lot of electricity, and he says to be honest about the impacts.

If a four or five trillion dollar expenditure in the next three or four years is real, he says, the sum is about what it costs to build the national highway system in the United States, and more is needed. He frames the riddle as a PhD in economics whose thesis asks how to spend the most money and create the fewest jobs.