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I feel like my experience having been inside of datacenters, having been in charge of datacenters and being in planning meetings for new datacenters should give me some kind of edge in discussions about datacenters but I am mostly as hapless as everyone else.
They do create jobs, actually more skilled blue collar jobs than you might appreciate, but not like thousands of them. There's a ton of work to get them built but ongoing maintenance is probably tens of people employed permanently.
The water claims are mostly fake. Towns may sign bad deals on hooking them up with power instead of making them improve infrastructure.
What else is there to say.
The average datacenter, from my vantage point in the skilled trades, seems to employ ~10-15 maintenance people full time, plus 2 ish HVAC techs from contractors, 2 electricians and an apprentice from an electrical contractor.
It's also worth noting that the most reliable way to get HVAC techs of the appropriate specialty is by signing a contract to use only union labour. There are only a small number of pipelines for training these guys(datacenter HVAC is not a standard commercial package unit), and the union runs the biggest, like 'probably half or more of the total' biggest. Trane(the factory) runs the second biggest, and it's a lot slower. Most HVAC companies willing to extensively retrain their technicians do so for refrigeration instead, because refrigeration is 1)easier 2)very urgent and 3)easy to find clients for. Plus you can hire a refrigeration only tech- he'll be an odd duck, but you can find one pretty easily- to run that training, without having to sign on with some external guild-like organization.
Haha yes! Aside from those techs, my datacenter in London had a revolving door for life safety system specialists doing periodic inspections and recharges or call-outs to tinker with sensitivity on systems false alarming every Saturday morning during my hangovers.
The fire department got to take a trip over a few times to confirm our VESDA was false alarming.
If I had credits I would make a heart warming promotional video for datacenters and how they give opportunity to so many noble professionals who work with more than just keyboard muscles.
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Yeah, this is about it, though I can't really speak for the data centers that I've not been involved with. My work more concerns the environmental compliance and property management, and everything I've been involved in has really went over and above the call of duty to do things right. Frankly, a lot of these places will be better after the data center than they were before. While I personally don't want a data center next door, there are many worse things.
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