Georgia powers ahead in data center boom amid energy costs debate
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Data center work is a burgeoning field in Georgia and elsewhere, but raw job numbers aren't generally much to write home about yet.
Why it matters: Companies, investors and governments 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.
- Georgia started 2024 with 25,000 data center jobs in the first quarter.
Caveat: These numbers include data centers as well as computer infrastructure providers, web hosting, data processing and a few other related fields.
Zoom in: Georgia's data center boom is turning rural farmland into big boxes and even crowding urban areas like Atlanta, where QTS recently built a hulking compound adjacent to the Beltline and Howell Station, a single-family neighborhood.
- In December, an Atlanta City Council member shelved his request to waive a city ordinance prohibiting data centers near the Beltline Westside Trail after pushback from nearby communities.
Zoom out: There were about 452,000 data center jobs nationally as of the first quarter of 2024.
- That was less than half a percent of all U.S. private-sector jobs at the time.