Few Jobs for North Carolinians in the iCloud
According to this Washington Post article, Apple’s massive new data center in North Carolina created only 50 jobs associated with running the facility, and Google and Facebook data centers in the state have also failed to dent the unemployment rate due to a lack of technical skills among local residents. Construction-related jobs are created, but they’re temporary. That’s not to say the data centers won’t help the local economies some, but not as much as it might seem, especially in light of the massive tax breaks used as lures.
Our friend Chuck Goolsbee, who's a data center expert, argues that there's nothing really new here - that low-skill jobs are always being lost as technology makes them obsolete, and that any economic benefits these data centers provide are better than nothing.
http://chuck.goolsbee.org/archives/3854
He's absolutely right, of course, but it's important that the large technology firms creating massive data centers in economically impoverished areas be seen neither as saviors or villains. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between.