AIBU to point out that datacentres don't provide local employment?

Data centres have changed in the last 20 years. It used to be that servers were treated as pets, where each one was unique and cherished and it was vital that they were all kept running all the time. Those places need various skilled staff to be quickly available to keep it all running.

Servers are livestock now - if you've got 20,000 chickens then it's not an emergency if you lose a few. You just send someone in every now and then to shovel out the carcasses and throw in some new chicks.

@Apileofballyhoo

We'd have a much bigger impact by refusing to use AI. The International Energy Agency reckon a single ChatGPT prompt uses ten times the energy of a legacy Google search.

We should all be making an effort to keep data use as low as possible (as I post on Mumsnet). It should be something that's encouraged by governments like home insulation, reducing journeys/using public transport, recycling etc.

Reducing email subscriptions, deleting photos and videos and asking companies etc to delete any data from old accounts. I think maybe online purchases made as a guest might be better than opening an account. Deleting old email addresses is another.

Mumsnet themselves should be looking at this, do all the posts from the year dot need to be stored and accessible?

Meh, wrote that badly.

Watts (W) refer to the amount of energy used per hour.

Watt-hours (Wh) refer to the total amount of energy used. You often state the period over which that total was used, otherwise it's not very meaningful.

(I know many folk on this thread already know all this.)

To give some idea of the energy problem, the Westfield energy plant has just been built locally reusing a brownfield site.

It expects to produce up to 24 Megawatts of baseload electricity.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/business-environment/business/5314368/westfield-energy-recovery-facility-fife/

Cato's proposed Auchtertool datacentre plans to use 600 Megawatts.

[NB Watts (W) refer to a rate of usage; Watt-hours (Wh) refer to total usage in a given time.]

Cato claims the Auchtertool datacentre will take 3 years to build.

They want to build on farmland, rather than on a nearby brownfield site because that would take a few years to clean up. (Of course cleaning up a brownfield site would also create jobs, and be of benefit to the community as an act in itself. But Cato aren't interested in doing that.)

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/fife/5504512/controversial-fife-ai-data-centre-security-details/

This is interesting, I worked in a datacentre back on the early 2000s and we had quite a few people physically located in the building. This was ancient tech by today's standards but from friends still working in infrastructure roles the more modern stuff is likely to go pop at a moments notice. Depending on the criticality of what's being hosted there and the sheer scale of the kit in there I'd expect they'd need a decent number of engineers on site on a 24/7 basis (so multiple shifts, enough for holiday cover, different specialists for server, networking etc).

Yes you can have remote monitoring and the actual performance of the infrastructure as code managed by SREs anywhere in the world, but there's a butt tonne of physical kit that needs human hands and eyes in there. I doubt they'd rely on on-call infrastructure engineers every time something went down.

The residents of Auchertool village will suffer significant loss of amenity.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/fife/5506416/fife-data-centre-height-12-storey-building/

However the wider impact is that the datacentre's annual electricity consumption is projected be 4,000 GWh, ie 4 TWh.

Scotland's entire current annual energy use in 2024 was 21.7 TWh. This single datacentre is projected to use 20% of Scotland's current electricity usage.

There's no meaningful plan for how this additional electricity will be generated.

https://aprs.scot/resources/aprs-objection-to-fife-council-for-the-auchtertool-fife-data-centre/
By our calculations taking an average load factor of 80%1 the development will use:
600 x 0.80 x 24 x 365 = 4,204,800 MWh (4.2 TWh) of energy a year. (This is roughly in line with the figures from the applicant’s “Statement of Energy intention” which says that Cato’s ultimate potential annual energy usage would be 4000GW, ie 4 TWh). For illustration of the scale of use, the total energy consumption of Scotland in 2024 was 21.7 TWh so Cato’s predicted usage is
comparable to 20% of the whole of Scotland’s energy use in 2024.

I was listening to a podcast and they said that it would take close to a decade to build these places, so it is a decade of employment opportunities

The impact on the construction industry cannot be overstated. It currently accounts for nearly 10% of GDP.

What is the sacrifice you will be making?

@TheRealMagic ”I heard Sam Altman being asked why the people of Utah would want a data centre bigger than Manhattan and that uses more than twice the electricity the whole state does currently, and he said that they would benefit if AI cures cancer”

I work for a massive pharmaceutical company specializing in oncology.
AI has already sped up (some) product development 5x, and they are still getting going with understanding what it can do. The scientists and researchers are delighted.

Sam does have a point.

I just googled the Lanarkshire one specifically and found this - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/lanarkshire-scotland-ai-datacentre-project-renewable-energy

Which suggests it will be closed loop, but that they haven't actually solved the problem this then causes, that it will absolutely guzzle electricity instead of water, which is my understanding of why the move to closed loop hasn't been as fast as predicted at one point.

Thanks for this thread.

There's a proposal for a datacentre local to me, and I've been wondering whether the trade-off of local job creation would make it worth the sacrifice of having the development.

Clearly not!

Yes I am sure you are right and governments should be honest about this. Unfortunately these things are so politically contentious that I suspect there is a tendency to massage the truth to try and get it built.

We are all suffering due to poor economic growth in this country and our trajectory (with the additional challenge of an aging population / falling birth rate) is pretty dire. Infrastructure is obviously important to growth but that's obviously quite abstract for local people vs the very real and present disruption.

I have sympathy for local people but I also have sympathy for governments trying to grown an economy with so much local objection to projects which will hopefully help the economy overall.

My understanding is that closed loop cooling is being moved towards, but that we're still building data centres that don't have it now, and also the trade-off for closed-loop is that it uses far less water but also much more electricity.

I'm not talking about those directly employed by the data centres, I was responding to a post by TheRealMagic (I forgot to quote so probably wasn't obvious) and we were discussing indirect employment.