Google illegally demolished an estimated 250,000 trees in Finland to make way for a data center, leaving behind a lifeless mud wasteland that forced packs of wolves into a nearby town in search of food and infuriated locals, according to a report.
Google illegally demolished an estimated 250,000 trees in Finland to make way for a data center, leaving behind a lifeless mud wasteland that forced packs of wolves into a nearby town in search of food and infuriated locals, according to a report.
Datacenters do not bring jobs or tax income! I scream into a room of people who do already know that but it breaks my heart seeing the damage done there.
They bring massive land, energy, and water use, and are manned by only a skeleton crew of tech workers, even a small town wouldn’t notice a bump in population or revenue.
Leaders who approve them are either too naive and stupid by not understanding this (and thus should be voted out) or they are corrupt and accepting bribes (and should be kicked out or minimum voted out)
They get bribes
They could bring tax income but they get tax breaks instead to bring 6 jobs in.
I work at a tiny old datacenter that employs like 40 people full time. And we have only like 50 racks of servers
Do you think the thing just runs itself? You need electrians, hvac specialists, fire system specialists, UPS specialists, on top of all the computer related roles. There are tons of different moving parts
It’s also one of the best ways to still get into the tech industry because the guys physically racking servers and replacing disks can be hired fresh out of school no problem, and those people directly work with veteran sysadmins who get to absorb that knowledge and move up that way
When I used to work at DCs, the only people that were full time employees were security and maintenance. The rest of us were contractors that would service all of the DCs in a region. Even the guys that ran the hardware would drive around to all of the DCs owned by that operator.
The building I used to work in had more than 40 maintenance, security, and IT people. But 5000 other people worked there and it was the size of the smallest DC. They create very little jobs.
Except modern DCs operate on a “lights out” policy. They can install racks of servers and capacity upfront and then only have to stop by every couple months with a remote team to swap things out. Churning away with power from your community and tax breaks but no workers to deal with. It’s already a thing.
There is plenty of work when the older Data Centers are gutted for modernization.
You’re talking in terms of an individual. 50 people is not bringing a lot of jobs to an economy and not worth giving tax breaks to. To a town of 5000 it would be 1% of the population working there, maybe 2% with electricians as you say. Politicians think it’s like their corporate headquarters where thousands of people will be working there
Yeah but it’s 50 people in this very small scale example. Also all those people make good money and eat at restaurants most days for lunch. Etc etc
A big scale high compute datacenter would need hundreds of staff
You can make it 500 and it still isn’t that economic “boom” that big tech promises.
No but it’s not a build it and forget it thing either like the common narrative thinks these days
I didn’t say that, I said it’s a skeleton crew, which it is. Are those people technical? Yes. But it’s not something worth bringing to your small town expecting jobs.
It technically isn’t a skeleton crew if that small workforce is the standard roster for that project.
How do you define skeleton crew?
The people making good money working “at” these datacenters eat at restaurants thousands of miles away from the towns the datacenters are located. There are very few local datacenters jobs and the ones that are local do not make very good money.
Big scale high compute datacenters need like 15-30 people to operate, not hundreds.
No the people working at my datacenter eat across the street from the datacenter lol
You don’t work at one of these modern AI or hyperscale datacenters, so it’s not super relevant where you eat. I on the other hand eat lunch hundreds of miles away from some of my datacenters, thousands of miles away from the others. The handful of janitors and security that work closer certainly can’t afford to eat at work and are more than likely brown bagging it from home. Because practically everything is automated, everyone else is a contractor and don’t even work for us and so they probably eat wherever it is they actually work.
Those physical rack and stackers certainly don’t work with experienced sysadmins, they get written work orders and they show up, complete them, and leave. There’s no moving up because being rack & stackers is the beginning and end of their career ladder.
It honestly sounds like you just work for some old legacy “datacenter” that’s been around since the late 90’s and is still being run as such, and then extrapolating that to a much bigger modern datacenter and trying to scale up the employees to match but modern datacenters are not run that way. The day to day operations are done mostly external contractors, they aren’t hiring full time employees for this stuff. The few well paying high level jobs go to people hundreds or thousands of miles away, often not to a new person but are just added as an additional site under the workload of an existing team. Everything in the middle is automated.
Yes datacenters practically run themselves. Modern datacenters owned and operated by one company are very efficient role wise and need a skeleton crew to operate.