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

[SadiraOfTyr]

The government appears to be making a big deal about datacentres (AI or not) being a huge growth area. The reality is that datacentres, once built, employ virtually no-one - a handful of security guards and that's it. Maintenance, repairs, cooling and power, racking and cabling of servers, storage, and networking kit is intermittent and done by specialists brought in for the job. Most of the time datacentres are a (very noisy) ghost town.

Datacentres are all managed and run remotely by SREs (site reliability engineers) who can be stationed hundreds of miles away, and often in a different country.

YABU: Datacentres will provide thousands of high quality jobs in neglected parts of the country long after construction.
YANBU: The government is having the wool pulled over its eyes by big tech companies who, even if all these datacentres are completed, will never employ more than a handful of locals in low pay occupations such as security and cleaning.

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

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 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.

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.

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/

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.]

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.)

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?

@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.

That’s not how it works anymore. Failures are factored in and failed systems (usually power supplies) are replaced on a schedule. You don’t need technicians on standby because there is so much redundancy in modern distributed systems that if something fails it can just be replaced in the next maintenance window. Outages are almost universally caused by software issues not hardware failures.

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.

Exactly.

I'm currently on the other AI thread running at the moment.

I'm astonished by the naivety of the pro AI zealots who are waving away all concerns presented with almost religious zealotry.

It's almost as though we are being programmed for inevitable assimilation / obsolescence. But it's okay cos the big data centre in the sky will answer all our silly little prayers....

Thanks for starting this thread OP, am trying to absorb as much information as I can, because a tiny bit of my Gen X brain is clinging to the hope that knowledge is power.

No it's really not, critical national infrastructure isn't going to wait for the next maintenance cycle (especially if it's part of a water cooling system or a generator). The odd disk going pop could wait for a longer time if there's plenty of redundancy but a big ass core router couldn't (running on no redundancy is a big no). The cloud means a lot of the hardware issues are transparent from the software, I really don't think hardware failures have magically disappeared. Unless you actually work in AWS or similar n which case I stand corrected 😁

But yes, max a couple of hundred jobs per site if you factor in the physical security (again it's critical national infrastructure so it's not going to be one bloke and a dog per shift).

That said I've actually read the report now and it says,

The government designated 5 AI Growth Zones across Great Britain, including 2 in Wales and one in Scotland – generating £28.2 billion in investment, creating more than 15,000 jobs, and providing £5 million of targeted funding for each zone to drive adoption at the local level.

So the government haven't been explicit about it creating local jobs I don't think, although the £5 million funding for each zone hints that they could be hoping to attract startups or other businesses to the local area.

Sorry, got mixed up: Cato is the name of the Auchtertool project; the company name is ILI Group.

Cato is intended to be the largest of the new datacentres and ILI believes it will create... 120 jobs. Doesn't state that the jobs will be at the datacentre.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/business-environment/business/5504466/fife-auchtertool-data-centre-ceo-mark-wilson/

Cato is the largest of three proposed ‘hyperscale’ data centres, providing 600MW of storage. The others would be Aurelius (400MW) in North Lanarkshire, and Rufus (540MW) in East Ayrshire.
...
Mr Wilson points to a study projecting that the data centre would create 120 permanent jobs – “on salaries 50% higher than the Fife average” – and more than 500 jobs during the construction phase. ... “It won’t create huge employment,” Mr Wilson admitted.

@SadiraOfTyr I think you're making an assumption that MPs have both intelligence and critical thinking.
Unlike an old dodgy server, we can't just chuck them in a skip when they prove to be lacking.

@LasagneGoblin "big-ass core routers" don't go pop. They have massive internal redundancy and are themselves replicated. There is no-one sat on full pay with a bunch of spares at a datacentre waiting for a core router to go pop.

In fact massive expensive hardware routers are pretty much of the past now - routing is done in a distributed manner in software, so most of your physical network is just very fast switches, all of which are interchangeable.

Remember too that entire data zones are replicated - hence why you can replicate your data and spread your compute over eu-west-1, eu-west-2, eu-west-3.

Marvellous. Isn't there a contradiction though. Do we actually need to cure cancer when human labour will no longer be required by the people who own these technologies?

I don't use AI for that reason.

The government isn’t having the wool pulled over - someone there will be making money

Terrestrial data centres are a transient phenomena. With 20% of the UKs GDP already dependent on space research, there is no way humans will not be putting data centres in space within the next 10 years.

Yes of course they have internal redundancy but you don't leave it sat there with reduced redundancy even if only an internal component fails.

And yes you'd have redundant sites as well but again I really don't think they'd leave gb-nw-001 (or whatever we call the actual things we build because obvs were not replicating AWS global regions) sat there with something big knackered for any significant amount of time.

Anyway I agree that the actual data centres probably won't have many staff in, but the government aren't explicitly promising local jobs by the look of it.

Exactly that. It's been a while since I worked with the really big-ass routers but I do work with moderate-ass ones. They've got redundant PSUs, fan trays, route processors, switch fabrics and so on. And that's just a single box whereas we always install at least two. The only failures we typically get are with optics (which are also multiply redundant) or problems during software upgrades.

Brutal analogy 😱

Yes but that's redundancy isn't it and any reduced redundancy would need to be fixed, you don't just leave it sat there. But clearly none of us work in an AI data centre so who knows.

Anyway like I said to OP I agree it's not going to create tonnes of local jobs but the government aren't explicitly saying it is.