Datacentre job forecasts dwarf actual employment records
The jobs miracle that does not compute
The fear, when a datacentre is planned near a town, is that the community will trade its water and electricity for jobs that never arrive. The fear cannot be settled by repeating industry forecasts, but it can be tested against records. The records are public, scattered through planning applications, company accounts and press releases, and a new analysis has gone through them. What it found turns an anxious suspicion into a measurable gap between promised jobs and actual jobs. Verdant, an environmental thinktank, predicts that all the datacentres currently planned in Britain will directly employ about 10,400 people. TechUK, the industry lobby group, cites more than 40,000 jobs in its projections for the same building programme. The government has echoed TechUK's claims about job creation, and Labour has defended the rapid rollout of AI datacentres in the face of growing public scepticism about their demand for water and energy. The two sets of numbers differ by a factor of about four. Verdant's figure rests on 20 projects with publicly available staffing levels, drawn from planning applications, company accounts and press releases and checked against international comparisons. The analysis counts only the permanent workers needed to operate and maintain the centres. It sets aside the much larger number of temporary construction jobs needed to build them. The gap is sharpest when employment is counted against energy. Existing datacentres, Verdant finds, have directly created fewer than 4,400 jobs, roughly 8.6 jobs for each megawatt of electricity they consume. TechUK's projections imply 43.7 jobs per megawatt. A megawatt is a standard unit of electrical power, so this is a simple question: how much employment does a given amount of energy support? The projects now at the planning stage are far larger than anything built so far, and Verdant expects them to be far less job-intensive, possibly creating as few as 1.6 permanent jobs per megawatt
The strange arithmetic of a megawatt
[Pic1] To show what those ratios mean, Verdant places datacentres next to other users of electricity. One megawatt currently supports about 8.6 datacentre jobs, the thinktank calculates. The same megawatt supports roughly 400 jobs in a car plant. In a hospital or other health facility, it supports more than 3,600. The government rejects the comparison and questions the methodology. A spokesperson says the report relies on a deeply misleading jobs-per-megawatt metric and makes false comparisons with hospitals and schools. It appears to confuse electricity capacity with actual consumption, the spokesperson argues. More seriously, in the government's view, the report discounts the wider economic value of compute - the raw processing capacity itself - and the national security and sovereignty case for building critical digital infrastructure in Britain. Verdant answers that it deliberately worked from the electricity capacity the tech firms claim to need in their planning documents. Even if finished datacentres never consume all that capacity, the reserved power can still crowd out alternative plans for the grid. For the thinktank, that makes the metric a measure of what a project takes off the table, not only of what it puts on it. TechUK defends the figure the government echoed. The UK datacentre industry already supports 43,500 jobs and could support 40,000 more by 2035, TechUK says. The estimate is built on a published methodology using industry data and standard economic-impact assessment techniques, and TechUK regards it as a reasonable measure of the sector's employment contribution.
The race to build first and justify later
While the numbers remain in dispute, political decisions have already been taken. Labour has classified AI datacentres as critical national infrastructure in an attempt to speed up the planning process. Andy Burnham has underlined his backing for the sector by appointing the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, to his cabinet. Narayan advocates a rapid increase in datacentre capacity, partly on grounds of national sovereignty. In an interview published last month, he said the British public wants strong defence and does not want foreign billionaires to own things that matter to British lives. Without a sovereign level of datacentre capacity in this country, he argues, Britain cannot be true to those values. [Pic2] Opposition has formed around the costs that the economic case leaves out. The Green party in England has called for a moratorium on datacentre building, and there have been protests in Scotland over large projects being rushed through. Zack Polanski, the party's leader in England, says the government plans to steamroller local opposition so private companies can build datacentres, but cannot explain what the benefits are. England and Wales are still facing drought after the hottest summer on record, he notes, and the datacentres are set to be given priority access to water A pause, the government counters, would simply send investment and good jobs abroad, leaving Britain dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defence data. James Meadway, co-director of Verdant, does not dismiss the technology: artificial intelligence and related technologies have great potential, he says. But vast new datacentres arrive at significant real costs to local communities, he argues, and even to the country's climate ambitions. The case for them has to be made by government and industry before the buildout, Meadway insists - Britain should not assume it can build first and find the reasons afterwards.