🏛️ Issues and Advocacy Training
Courses › Data Centers: Types, Purposes and How They Work

Lesson 8 of 9 · about 17 minutes

Site Selection, Construction and Jobs

You'll be able to

  • List the factors developers use to rank sites and explain why time to power now comes first
  • Lay out a typical data center project timeline from land option to operation
  • Compare construction employment with permanent employment using sourced figures
  • Read a job claim critically and compute cost per job from incentive figures

Developers keep a scorecard for every candidate site. The weights have shifted since 2023. Cheap land and tax breaks used to top the list; now the first question is how many megawatts the site can get and how soon. A perfect parcel that waits seven years for power loses to a mediocre one that can be energized in two.

The site scorecard

FactorWhat developers look forWhy it mattersWhat to check locally
Power availability and time to powerHundreds of MW within a few years; nearby high-voltage lines and substations with spare capacityThe single biggest constraint; interconnection waits run yearsUtility load forecasts, large load requests, transmission plans
FiberTwo or more long-haul fiber routes from different carriers, on different pathsRedundant connectivity; cloud regions also need low-delay links between zonesFiber maps from carriers, state broadband office
WaterEnough supply for the chosen cooling, or a plan for closed-loop systemsEvaporative cooling needs large volumes on hot daysWater rights, municipal capacity, drought plans
LandFlat, large parcels (hundreds to thousands of acres for AI campuses), zoned or zonable for industrial useRoom for buildings, substations, generators and future phasesZoning maps, the local land use plan, recent land sales
Taxes and incentivesSales tax exemptions on equipment, property tax abatementsServers are replaced every few years; sales tax on them adds up fastState incentive statutes, local abatement agreements
LatencyNear users and exchange points (cloud, inference); anywhere with power (training, mining)Live services feel distance; batch jobs do notDistance to the nearest major metro and exchange
ClimateCool or dry air for free cooling; low humidity helps evaporative systemsLower cooling energy and waterClimate normals, cooling degree days
Disaster riskOutside floodplains, away from fault lines, low tornado and wildfire riskLong-lived, expensive equipment; insurance costsFEMA flood maps, USGS hazard maps, wildfire risk maps
Workforce and politicsElectricians and technicians nearby; a receptive local governmentBuilding and staffing; speed of approvalsLocal labor market, past votes on similar projects

Why power comes first now

CBRE reported in September 2026 that North American primary market vacancy was 1.4 percent and that power constraints were stretching completion timelines. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2026 Queued Up report found median waits above five years from interconnection request to commercial operation for generation projects completed in 2025. New load faces its own queue at the utility. Developers respond by buying sites with existing power (old industrial plants, retired coal plant sites, crypto mines), by building their own on-site generation, and by spreading load requests across many utilities and dropping the slow ones.

Concentration has limits. Ireland's Central Statistics Office reported that data centres used 22 percent of the country's metered electricity in 2024, up from 5 percent in 2015. Northern Virginia's 0.2 percent vacancy is a power problem more than a land problem. Those constraints are pushing developers into places that never had a data center before.

A typical timeline

Year 1Year 2Year 3Year 4Year 5 Land, power request Zoning, permits Utility upgrades Shell construction Fit-out, testing Phased operation
An illustrative schedule for a large campus. Utility work is usually the long pole. Fast projects on already-powered land have gone from groundbreaking to first buildings live in about 14 months.

Fast cases exist. At Stargate Abilene, construction began in July 2024 and the first two buildings were reported operational, with more than 200 MW of IT capacity, by September 2025. That speed relied on a site that already had a power plan. Most projects take longer, and big campuses open in phases: one building energized while the next is under construction and a third is a slab.

Jobs: construction versus operation

Data centers create a lot of construction work and relatively few permanent jobs per dollar invested. The ratio is the part people most often get wrong, so whenever a job figure comes up, ask for both numbers.

ProjectConstruction workforcePermanent jobsSource
Stargate Abilene, Texas (1.2 GW planned)About 7,000 on site daily, late 2025Not stated in the sourceData Center Dynamics
Meta Hyperion, LouisianaMore than 3,700, planned to reach 5,000500 announcedFortune, Feb. 2026
Colocation benchmarkNot applicableAbout 20 to 30 per 100 MWCatherine Curtis, Governing opinion column (no source given for the range)

Permanent staff include facility engineers, electricians and HVAC technicians, security officers, network and server technicians, and managers. Many work for contractors, not the owner. These jobs often pay well. Hiring them is hard: Uptime Institute's 2025 survey found 46 percent of operators struggle to find qualified candidates and 37 percent struggle to keep staff.

Research on county-level effects is newer. An analysis by Dany Bahar and Greg Wright, published by Brookings in May 2026 and revised in August 2026, compared counties that got large data centers with counties where announced projects were canceled. It found data processing employment up about 56 percent and telecommunications up about 43 percent over the first decade, no change in wages, and home prices up 2 to 5 percent. Industry groups point to broader effects from construction spending and tax revenue. Skeptics point to state reports showing modest job counts against large incentives. Both kinds of evidence are real; they answer different questions.

Worked example: cost per permanent job

Virginia's Department of Taxation, in a 2026 report to the General Assembly (RD40), showed operators reporting 1,610 net new jobs in fiscal 2025 and an aggregate reported tax benefit of about $1.9 billion. Catherine Curtis, a former Southern California Edison employee and planning commissioner, ran the division below in a June 2026 Governing opinion column.

  • $1,900,000,000 divided by 1,610 = about $1,180,000 per job

Now an invented local case. The county of Sable Ridge offers a 15-year property tax abatement worth an estimated $240 million on a campus promising 60 permanent jobs.

  • $240,000,000 divided by 60 = $4,000,000 per job
  • Per year of abatement: $4,000,000 divided by 15 = about $267,000 per job per year

That does not settle whether the deal is good. The campus may still pay more tax than the farmland it replaces, and construction spending is real. But it gives residents and officials a number they can weigh. When you cite it, say which taxes were abated and which still get paid.

Common mix-ups

  • Claim: A project that brings 5,000 jobs. What the evidence shows: That is usually peak construction, for a year or two. Ask for permanent jobs separately and whether they are employees or contractors.
  • Claim: Data centers go where land is cheapest. What the evidence shows: Land is a small share of total cost. Power, fiber and speed of approval matter far more.

Reporting angle

  • Ask for permanent job numbers in writing, with average wages, and whether the incentive agreement has clawbacks if targets are missed.
  • Request the incentive or abatement agreement and any performance reports the company must file.
  • Check FEMA flood maps for the parcel and note any floodplain overlap.
  • Ask the utility for its time-to-power estimate and what upgrades are needed. Check the state transmission plan.
  • Compare announced construction workforce with available local trades; ask where workers will live and how traffic will be handled.

Research angle

Check yourself

1. In 2026, which factor most often decides where a large data center goes?

2. At its peak, the Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas reportedly had about how many construction workers on site daily?

3. Meta announced how many permanent full-time jobs for its multi-billion-dollar Hyperion campus in Louisiana?

4. Virginia's Department of Taxation reported 1,610 new data center jobs in fiscal 2025 while the industry received about $1.9 billion in tax benefits. Roughly what is the cost per job?

5. Why does latency matter less for an AI training campus than for a cloud region?

6. What did the Brookings analysis by Bahar and Wright (updated August 2026) find about wages in counties that got large data centers?

Terms in this lesson

Time to power
How long it will take before a site can get the electricity it needs from the grid or its own generation.
Powered land
Land that already has, or has a firm commitment for, a large electric service.
Entitlement
The approvals, such as zoning and site plan, that give a landowner the legal right to build a project.
Shell
The building structure and envelope, before power and cooling equipment and IT fit-out are installed.
Fit-out
Installing the electrical, mechanical and IT systems inside a finished shell.
Permanent job
An ongoing position at the operating facility, as opposed to temporary construction work.

Full glossary

Sources