How many ongoing jobs do data centres create? There's disagreement, even in business community
One of the selling points for building a data centre in your local area is the promise of local job creation. Jobs to build the data centres in the beginning, then jobs to run operations once it's up and running. But prominent investor AirTree Ventures co-founder Daniel Petre set a cat among the pigeons on a panel this morning when he suggested that the ongoing demand for jobs to run data centres is close to negligible. "The idea that it's going to be a massive employer is completely bullshit. There are two people and a canary who manage a data centre up once it's up and running," he said at the Australian Financial Review's AI Summit. Immediately after Petre's appearance, Google's VP of global infrastructure Bikash Koley gave keynote address in which he argued that numbers of data centres employment understates the indirect benefits. "For every job that we create in a data centre in its operational phase, there are additional jobs that are created because of the ecosystem that is created through this data centre, where it's power generation, cooling, or supply chain," he said. Tech Council of Australia chair and Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar later tried to square the circle by acknowledging the limited ongoing jobs, but pointing out the sheer size of data centre construction demand. "[The numbers of jobs created in Australia]'s lower in the operation phase, but the construction phase can run for the next 10 to 20 years," he said.