Data centers require enormous investments: land, buildings, computer equipment, and power infrastructure. Yet, once they’re up and running, they tend to employ no more than a few dozen people in occupations such as IT technicians, engineers, and security guards. With billions of dollars flowing into new data centers across the United States, communities are asking what they will get in return.

Skepticism about the local benefits of data centers is contributing to growing opposition to their construction, from Ohio to Texas. That pushback contributed to delays or cancellations of $156 billion in proposed data center projects in 2025 alone.

We are professors who study real estate and urban economics, including how large place-based investments shape local economies. So we set out to answer a question at the center of these fights: Do data centers actually create jobs where they are built?

To find out, we teamed up with four colleagues to study what happens to local employment after data centers open. We found that new data centers that opened from 2000-2023 created 1,000 to 1,300 jobs in the counties where they are located, on average. But those jobs, which are for work performed outside data centers rather than inside them, take a few years to appear. They are mostly in industries that support data centers, not in restaurants or shops.

Data centers can create jobs in at least three ways beyond employing people who work inside them.

First, they can increase demand for local suppliers, from security companies that protect the facilities to electrical contractors that maintain their equipment.

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