Do data centres actually create jobs where they are built? Research shows gains are modest

Data centres require enormous investments: land, buildings, computer equipment and power infrastructure. Yet, once they’re up and running, they tend to employ no more than a few dozen people in occupations such as IT technicians, engineers and security guards. With billions of dollars flowing into new data centres across the United States, communities are asking what they will get in return.

Scepticism about the local benefits of data centres is contributing to growing opposition to their construction, from Ohio to Texas. That pushback contributed to delays or cancellations of US$156 billion in proposed data centre projects in 2025 alone.

We are professors who study real estate and urban economics, including how large place-based investments shape local economies. So we set out to answer a question at the centre of these fights: Do data centres actually create jobs where they are built?

To find out, we teamed up with four colleagues to study what happens to local employment after data centres open. We found that new data centres that opened from 2000-2023 created 1,000 to 1,300 jobs in the counties where they are located, on average. But those jobs, which are for work performed outside data centres rather than inside them, take a few years to appear. They are mostly in industries that support data centres, not in restaurants or shops.

How data centres create local jobs

Data centres can...

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