America's data center job hot spots
Data center work is a burgeoning field in parts of the American Southeast and elsewhere, but raw job numbers aren't generally much to write home about yet.
Why it matters: Companies, investors and government are pouring tons of money and resources into data centers to help power AI and other next-gen tech, but there's debate over how many jobs they'll create and whether they're worth the energy required to run them.
Driving the news: Arkansas (+241.9%), South Dakota (+179.4%) and Georgia (131.5%) had the biggest increases in data center employment between the first quarters of 2018 and 2024, per the U.S. Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators.
They were followed by Louisiana (+126.3%) and Idaho (+121.1%).
Yes, but: The raw numbers here are often relatively small.
Arkansas had only about 4,300 data center jobs in Q1 2024, for example. Georgia had about 25,000. And South Dakota? Just 394.
Zoom out: There were about 452,000 data center jobs nationally as of Q1 2024.
That's less than half a percent of all U.S. private-sector jobs at the time.
Caveat: These numbers include data centers as well as web hosting and a few other related fields.
The bottom line: Major tech companies are spending unprecedented gobs of money on data centers, as Axios' Michael Flaherty recently reported.
But all those billions upon billions of dollars may not generate that many jobs, unlike other big spending booms.
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