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In Abilene, Texas, some 1,500 people are building the first data center for the Stargate artificial-intelligence venture led by OpenAI.
Once it is completed, a lot fewer people will work there. The facility will have about 100 full-time employees, according to the city’s economic development agency. That total is a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same one million square feet if it were an office park, factory or warehouse. A 286,500-square-foot cheese-packaging plant that broke ground in Abilene in 2021 was projected to employ 500 people.
“Data centers have rightly earned a dismal reputation of creating the lowest number of jobs per square foot in their facilities” said John Johnson, chief executive of data-center operator Patmos Hosting.
Silicon Valley’s race to build advanced AI systems has sparked a related frenzy to build data centers with the chips needed to power them. Tech companies including Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft operate 445 data centers in the U.S. and have 249 in the pipeline, according to Synergy Research Group. Stargate plans to build at least 20. Their spending totals hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Politicians and business leaders have touted data centers as a boon for employment. At the press conference unveiling Stargate, President Trump said more than 100,000 new jobs would be created “almost immediately.” OpenAI published a blog post that said Stargate would “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs.”
The reality is data centers can employ more than 1,000 people in the several months or years it takes to build them, but rarely need more than one or two hundred once they open, according to Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale. Stargate would have to be much larger than currently planned to create hundreds of thousands of construction jobs, let alone permanent ones.
“Data Centers are very labor-intensive to build, not as labor-intensive to operate,” said Jim Grice, a real-estate and project-finance attorney who focuses on data centers.
An OpenAI spokeswoman said its estimate of the total jobs resulting from Stargate includes ones created indirectly by company and employee spending in communities.
More computers than people
Walking through a data center, the primary thing you would see are racks of whirring computers stretching hundreds of yards in every direction and connected by bundles of cables.
Occasionally an electrician who works on the wiring or a plumber who maintains the liquid cooling system might walk by. Other jobs for people who work in data centers include data analysts, software and hardware engineers, and security guards.
Patmos is erecting a data center in Missouri that will employ 40 to 50 people in a building that previously housed the printing press for the Kansas City Star.
Number of data centers, by state
10
50
100
200
Wash. 114
Ill.
162
Ohio
176
N.Y.
135
Ore.
121
Va.
537
Ariz.
113
Calif.
302
R.I.
Ga.
105
Texas
304
Conn.
N.J.
Fla.
119
Del.
Md.
Source: DataCenterMap.com
To garner local support, the company is also building a co-working space and office complex on the property that is expected to create hundreds of jobs.
People who build and operate data centers disagree about how to calculate their employment impact. Grice said construction jobs shouldn’t be considered short term because facilities take as long as 10 years to complete.
Dinsdale noted that in the construction phase, people with expertise building data centers often move from one project to another, so new positions don’t always create net new employment.
Rural-friendly
Before the AI boom, data centers were used primarily to store information and run applications. Locating them near population centers and tech hubs was important to maximize the speed at which they connect to people.
Many new data centers are used to develop AI models in a process called training. Because consumers and businesses don’t need to access an AI system during training, they can be built in remote areas where land is plentiful, energy is cheaper and even a few hundred new jobs are meaningful.
“It doesn’t make sense to be in New York City where power is better used to operate big office buildings or high-density housing,” said Chase Lochmiller, CEO of Crusoe, which builds data centers. “But in a place like West Texas where you don’t have a lot of people but you have land and power, that’s a great fit.”
Crusoe is developing Stargate’s Abilene data center and building a gas power plant that will provide backup energy to it.
Lochmiller said the power plant will employ around 30 people. Crusoe also has manufacturing plants in Colorado and Oklahoma that will be building electrical equipment for the Abilene facility with some 400 workers.
Write to Tom Dotan at tom.dotan@wsj.com
The Global AI Race
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Appeared in the February 26, 2025, print edition as 'AI Data Center Boom Falls Far Short On Jobs'.
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