Jobs: Construction Crews and Permanent Staff

Data centers create a lot of jobs for a short time and a modest number for a long time. Almost every dispute about job claims comes from blurring those two.

Virginia's JLARC found in 2024 that each data center building takes about 12 to 18 months to build, with up to roughly 1,500 workers on site at peak. Once it opens, a typical 250,000-square-foot building has about 50 full-time workers, roughly half of them contractors. Those jobs tend to pay well: electricians, mechanical technicians, network engineers, security.

Statewide, JLARC estimated the industry supports about 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income and $9.1 billion in GDP a year in Virginia. The same report said most of those benefits come from the construction phase. In Virginia, construction never stopped, because new buildings kept starting. A county with one campus will see a construction wave and then a much smaller permanent staff.

Units that get mixed up

Cost per job

Cost per job is the incentive value divided by the jobs. It is simple and it is blunt, so say exactly what went into it.

Supporters object, with reason, that cost per job ignores the tax base. A data center may pay more in remaining property tax each year than the incentive costs, and its workers need few public services. The fair approach is to put cost per job next to net revenue whenever either one comes up.

Models, multipliers and "jobs supported"

Big job numbers in developer releases usually come from an input-output economic model. The model takes construction spending and operating spending, then estimates three layers: direct jobs on site, indirect jobs at suppliers, and induced jobs created when all those workers spend their pay at grocery stores and car dealers. The ratio of total jobs to direct jobs is the multiplier.

Multipliers are real economics, but they carry assumptions that the public rarely sees. The biggest one is where the money is spent. If the steel, switchgear and servers come from out of state, and half the crew lives in out-of-state hotels for 16 months, much of the spending leaks out of the county. A model built for the whole state will show more local benefit than a single rural county actually gets.

Virginia's JLARC used its own modeling for the 84-jobs-per-million figure, which makes it more independent than a developer study. In an October 2026 Cardinal News opinion piece, independent researcher Tommy Turner points to a PwC study commissioned by the Data Center Coalition, the industry trade group, as another source that circulates widely. Name the sponsor every time.

The strongest case on each side

For the job claims

JLARC's incentive reviews, as reported in a June 2026 Cardinal News opinion column by Dwayne Yancey, found the data center exemption produced 84 jobs per $1 million of exemption. JLARC's 2025 report put the average across all the incentives it reviewed at about 58. The permanent jobs pay well and do not require a four-year degree in many cases. Construction trades see sustained demand in active markets: Turner, using federal union filings, found inside electrical construction union membership grew 17.3 percent faster in hyperscale metros than in comparable ones through 2025. He built that series himself, since no published one exists, so treat it as one researcher's estimate.

Against the job claims

Permanent jobs are few for the capital involved. Idaho's exemption needs only 30 jobs for $250 million. Turner also noted that JLARC's 50-jobs figure came from data center representatives and matches Virginia's statutory threshold, so it may reflect the requirement rather than independent counts. Construction crews are often traveling specialists, so local hiring may be thinner than the announced number. And construction jobs end, which matters most in a county that will only ever host one campus.

Moses Lake, Washington, is a good check on hydro-powered industrial promises. Group14 built a 1-million-square-foot battery materials campus there and Sila a plant of more than 600,000 square feet, both citing cheap hydropower. REC Silicon halted polysilicon production there in December 2024, and OneD closed its pilot plant in May 2025, less than a year after opening it, the Moses Lake news site Source One reported. Pierson's What Power Really Costs Idaho was written before some of those closings; date your examples.