The Workers Keeping AI Data Centers Running
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, September 25th. I'm Isabel Busquets, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute. Data centers have stirred up a heated debate over the last few years. Facilities, which contain rows and rows of servers needed for powering both the nation's internet and its massive AI boom, have been criticized for their consumption of power and water and their overall impact on the environment and local communities. And as the country's data center footprint has rapidly expanded, so has the backlash.
You're the biggest liar I have ever seen. The rage against data centers on full display in Battleground, Michigan. For 13 hours, hundreds of residents protesting two proposed data centers, worried they will spike utility bills, drain water resources, and destroy farmland.
One way that tech giants and data center operators have been trying to smooth things over is by pointing to local job creation. Nearly 400 more facilities are already under construction, with an additional 1,500 planned, according to data provider Data Center Map. But what is it like to work in one?
Why are data centers facing backlash from local communities?
WSJ's Owen Tucker Smith traveled to Ashburn, Virginia, one of the country's largest data center clusters, to see firsthand what the day-to-day of a data center employee looks like, why the jobs fetch surprisingly high salaries, and how the growing backlash against AI is impacting the workers. He joins us now to share what he learned. Oh, and these data centers, these are buildings that look pretty nondescript from the outside. We think of them as just being full of servers, but obviously people actually work inside these buildings. What do they do?
These are not the kinds of staffs that you'd see in maybe an auto manufacturing plant where there's 1,000 people. It's more like 50 or 100. But there's a crew of engineers and technicians who their job is basically to make sure that nothing breaks because the one job of a data center is to stay operational. The goal is 99.999% of the time because if you go down for a few seconds, then America's internet is in peril.
Ewan went inside a data center to talk to workers for this story. Let's hear a little bit from one of them, talking through what he's checking to make sure things are running smoothly. And as a heads up for listeners, this is a little hard to hear because of how loud the machinery is.
From here, I see there's no visible leaks, right? I would also check to see if there's any smells or anything like that. Nope, looks good.
So they are trying to make sure that the servers are still running and that they're not overheating and that there are no cracks in the equipment and that the electricity is all set. And so it's a lot of maintenance and repairs, communicating with customers and just making sure that everything looks good.
When tech companies decide to build a data center somewhere, I understand one of the things they'll try to do to sell it to the local community is to say, this is something that will bring a lot of jobs here. Does that prove out?
Yeah. So it's sort of one of those compared to what questions, because a lot of times when people see a big facility being built, they think of kind of the classic American manufacturing facility, which it can anchor some of these cities, whether it's like the defense industry or cars, or something else. These are huge plants that employ hundreds, if not thousands of people who then form the core of the town. And this isn't really that. The data centers will say that compared to many office buildings, these facilities employ a lot of people and that we shouldn't be complaining about an extra 50 or 100 or 200 jobs in a town.
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