There’s big money in building data centers, specifically big money for businesses like the Des Moines construction firm The Weitz Co. But what’s in it for the rest of us? Ryan Lamb from Weitz argued in an April 5 Register opinion piece that data centers offer a better future for all of Iowa. They don’t.
Lamb presented some numbers and they sound big. He said each data center build employs 500 construction workers over the life of the construction, with a current total of 9,000 people employed. Is 9,000 a big number? Nine thousand pennies is only $90. Ten thousand people in Iowa work as cooks, according to recent data from Iowa Workforce Development. Eighteen thousand people wait tables. Twenty-four thousand work in fast food. Now, construction jobs generally pay better than all of those jobs. (Maybe Iowa could raise wages in the restaurant industry! That would help more people than are helped by data centers.) Data center construction creates fewer jobs than the restaurant industry creates for cooks alone, or for wait staff alone. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that at the end of last year there were about 1.7 million Iowans in the workforce. Nine thousand is a tiny fraction of 1.7 million. My point is that if we look at data center construction in the big picture, it turns out that we’re not really talking about that many jobs.
Now, I’m from a family of construction workers, so I do value construction jobs. But how long do data center construction jobs actually last? Lamb says a project employs 500 construction workers “from start to finish” but he doesn’t say how long “start to finish” actually is. The business law firm Avisen states that the construction of a data center takes from one to three years. This suggests that those 500 jobs per project are pretty short-lived. And that’s if those 500 jobs exist for the entire project, which isn’t clear. After all, once the plumbing is finished in a project, the plumbers’ work is usually done…