America's data center job hot spots
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Data center work is a burgeoning field in parts of the American Southeast and elsewhere, but raw job numbers aren't generally much to write home about yet.
Why it matters: Companies, investors and government are pouring tons of money and resources into data centers to help power AI and other next-gen tech, but there's debate over how many jobs they'll create and whether they're worth the energy required to run them.
Driving the news: Arkansas (+241.9%), South Dakota (+179.4%) and Georgia (131.5%) had the biggest increases in data center employment between the first quarters of 2018 and 2024, per the U.S. Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators.
- They were followed by Louisiana (+126.3%) and Idaho (+121.1%).
Yes, but: The raw numbers here are often relatively small.
- Arkansas had only about 4,300 data center jobs in Q1 2024, for example. Georgia had about 25,000. And South Dakota? Just 394.
Zoom out: There were about 452,000 data center jobs nationally as of Q1 2024.
- That's less than half a percent of all U.S. private-sector jobs at the time.
Caveat: These numbers include data centers as well as web hosting and a few other related fields.
The bottom line: Major tech companies are spending unprecedented gobs of money on data centers, as Axios' Michael Flaherty recently reported.
- But all those billions upon billions of dollars may not generate that many jobs, unlike other big spending booms.
