alt Hacker Newshundreds of thousands of jobs? I'll wait for the postmortem on that prediction. Sounds a lot like Foxconn in Wisconsin but with more players.
Replies
seanmcdirmid • 01/22/2025
> hundreds of thousands of jobs?
I'm sure this will easily be true if you count AI as entities capable of doing jobs. Actually, they don't really touch that (if AI develops too quickly, there will be a lot of unemployment to contend with!) but I get the national security aspect (China is full speed ahead on AI, and by some measurements, they are winning ATM).
visarga • 01/22/2025
only $5M/job
On the one hand the number is a political thumb-suck which sounds good. It's not based in any kind of actual reality.
Yes, the data center itself will create some permanent jobs (I have no real feel for this, but guessing less than 1000).
There'll be some work for construction folk of course. But again seems like a small number.
I presume though they're counting jobs related to the existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I count that as a "job"?
What if we create a new post to leverage AI generally? Kinda like the way we have a marketing post, and a chunk of the daily work there is Adwords.
Once we start gustimamating the jobs created by the existence of an AI data center, we're in full speculation mode. Any number really can be justified.
Of course ultimately the number is meaningless. It won't create that many "local jobs" - indeed most of those jobs, to the degree they exist at all, will likely be outside the US.
So you don't need to wait for a post-mortem. The number is sucked out of thin air with no basis in reality for the point of making a good political sound bite.