AI’s giant rural job machine mostly appears to manufacture hype
The AI boom has discovered rural America, where struggling towns are being promised salvation in the form of enormous data centers, industrial temples to machine learning that reportedly create far fewer permanent jobs and more heat than the factories and mills they replace.
There’s little research into whether massive industrial sites actually deliver the long-term economic gains they promise, but early reports suggest otherwise. Experts say that rural communities often lack the governmental expertise to properly assess how data centers might impact an area. According to recent Pew Research Center data, 67 percent of planned data centers in the US are headed to rural areas, and 39 percent are going to counties that currently have none. As data center development scales rapidly, it’s becoming clear that what rural communities around the country are actually getting isn’t jobs, but a power- and water-hungry industrial facility that temporarily employs about as many people as a midsize restaurant.
The robots don’t really want your job; they want the water rights.