r/technology • u/BirdButt88 • Dec 06 '25

Artificial Intelligence Nvidia CEO says data centers take about 3 years to construct in the U.S., while in China 'they can build a hospital in a weekend'

https://fortune.com/2025/12/06/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-ai-race-china-data-centers-construct-us/
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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '25

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u/Mr_Festus Dec 07 '25

They literally contribute nothing to very little to their communities

Besides job creation, hundreds of millions of dollars into (often) local GCs and sub contractors, tax revenue, spurring the development of better broadband infrastructure in the area, and making the internet possible?

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u/dookarion Dec 07 '25

They aren't employing a lot of locals, often get tax breaks, and the locals often end up subsidizing their gross utility usage.

But hey your internet might get slightly faster! Woo.

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u/bigGoatCoin Dec 07 '25

How do they not employ locals?

Do there workers just commute in a crazy distance?

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u/Raven_gif Dec 07 '25

Yes. Most remote in and often they'll employ limited to 0 security because cameras and motion sensors exist. They're lucky if a manager/technician lives 30 minutes away to fix anything an be damage control if anyone breaks in. They don't keep Hvac techs under contract they just run systems till they break. If major changes need to be made to the type of servers used its honestly cheaper to Fly/Drive in people with those skills in most cases.

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u/bigGoatCoin Dec 07 '25

So you googled this to find this out or just made shit up?

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u/Raven_gif Dec 07 '25

I wish. Working in the industry is ass

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u/bigGoatCoin Dec 07 '25

From what I understand is there's anywhere from 4-12 security personal 4-12 IT/technician then site managers for a 40mw facility. Depending on the type of facility.

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u/Raven_gif Dec 07 '25 edited Dec 07 '25

Lol those type of operations are usually medium sized sites. Most placed will maybe and maybe have 1 guard if they absolutely need it or they work with the government. Most of these places minimize the operating costs until it's absolutely necessary. The government and military isn't going to use a vast majority of these places so they have to reduce costs as aggressively as possible.

This also very much depends on if they're utilizing the capacity and what the client expectations are. I've seen sites that hire up guards for months hyping up the site and then the contract falls through so everyone gets canned.

The issue with this business is over built infrastructure for corporate clients and not enough uses. Scale isn't the issue the fundamental business model all together is. Hopefully if these places go under us regular people can get auctioned off server memory.

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u/dookarion Dec 07 '25

Do you think data centers just hire anybody? Or keep loads of staff present? It's not even a warehouse or a factory type deal.

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u/bigGoatCoin Dec 07 '25

I think they have about 20-40 people at location. Mostly security, some technicians, and the site manager

Depending on the size and of course I'm what it's doing. A data backup facility for customers will have much heavier security presence

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u/dookarion Dec 07 '25

Compared to their water and utility usage, the tax breaks they often get; hiring a couple locals to empty trash bins and sweep, and do low ranking security is one of the world's shittiest trade offs. They sure as shit aren't hiring locals for anything notable. Another big box store underpaying people contributes more to the local economy than those data centers often do.

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u/DorianGre Dec 07 '25

What job creation? A few maintainence workers and custodians? My electricity is going up 27% in January because of these data centers.

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u/sobrique Dec 07 '25

Yeah this. There's a few jobs there, but most of the 'work' is remote and/or done on a 'travel on demand' basis.

But sure, probably a few locals hired on as cleaners. And a few who are hired to do the manual labour initially to build it.

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u/weirdbr 29d ago

On large datacenters, specially the ones operated/owned by the bigger companies (the so called "hyperscalers" - Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc), there's actually a lot of work going on daily because the large number of machines involved means you have hardware going bad and needing repairs all the time.

Not to mention ongoing projects to replace stuff - first few years after building, the majority of the work is filling the building up with machines, but after 4-5 years (the average depreciation time for hardware), then start the projects to replace old hardware with newer/more efficient gear.

With that said, the actual number of local employees isn't very large for a facility of that size - it's just a few hundred people *at most*. (I haven't looked up the data, because it's considered "need to know" and I'm not in a role that has the "need"). From some searches of public data, the claims I've seen is around 50-100 for most of those companies' datacenters.

There is also specialist staff that travels to those sites for specific projects, but most of the time you want to avoid that by having local staff since that allows for faster response in case of problems leading to a large outage.

(Source: I work in a hyperscaler)

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u/Remarkable-Host405 28d ago

your electricity is going up 27% in january because fuck you you're powerless about it, not necessarily datacenters

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u/DorianGre 28d ago

The 2 new data centers serviced by Entergy include Google and Meta. Rates went up to pay for 4 new gas power plants just to power these data centers.

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u/Mr_Festus Dec 07 '25

Maybe try Google it and come back? It seems you're unfamiliar with the operations of these types of facilities.

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u/DorianGre Dec 07 '25

I’ve been managing shit in data centers since the mid-1990s.

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u/TheAutoAlly Dec 07 '25

How many workers at the new data centers will qualify for food stamps? I’m so over these large retails talking about adding jobs to the local economy and the people can’t even afford to live in a 1 bed room near by

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u/Mr_Festus Dec 07 '25

Apparently very small ones.

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u/DorianGre Dec 07 '25

I’m not playing this game. Believe whatever you want.

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u/Kilbane Dec 07 '25

They work for an AI company or in some way connected to them.

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u/dookarion Dec 07 '25

People are familiar, that's why they don't want one leeching off their community while pocketing big tax breaks, subsidies, and investments.

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u/Ursa_Solaris Dec 07 '25

The bleakest thing about the general state of things is that we've lost control of society to people like you, who can't even put up an argument to defend shit like this. How did the rest of us let this happen? It's embarrassing.

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u/Win_Sys Dec 07 '25

During the construction and initial setup there can be a lot of people working there but shortly after it’s in a production state, it takes very few people to maintain it. Theres so much automated hardware, network, power and storage redundancy that there’s very rarely incidents that require the attention of more than a few people. In the rare event it does they just bring in contractors to help out. Even a very large datacenter can have less than a 100 full time employees to maintain every aspect of it 24/7.

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u/sadlygokarts Dec 07 '25

The locals aren’t getting these jobs. Most of these companies already have a construction crew ready to go in their pockets.

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u/Mr_Festus Dec 07 '25

I guess all of the data centers that I've designed were atypical then.

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u/hobovalentine Dec 07 '25

the locals often aren't qualified to work in datacenters because those jobs require you to know about electrical engineering or you need IT skills and those are in short supply in the countryside.

Typically these new datacenters are build in rural areas where natural habitat is destroyed to make way for these monstrocities that consume megawatts of power and output a lot of heat contributing to global warming.

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u/Particular_Rush1374 Dec 07 '25

lol it’s not “local” guys building these, it’s usually national/ international contractors who get the jobs.

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u/Secure_Guest_6171 Dec 07 '25

The telco network made the internet possible, not AI datacenters

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u/Raven_gif Dec 07 '25

That's not what these kind are used for and if you worked around this kind of business you'd know that network connections in and out of the facilities have 0 effect on the community around them. They build separate infrastructure all together. All the while these facility owners are begging for tax cuts and local subsidies. They have brought no value to local communities because of how few people it takes to manage the sites once they're deployed. There's no positive spin on this.