Earlier this month much hoopla was made by the Governor’s office when Gov. Bev Perdue visited Facebook’s datacenter in Forest City in Rutherford County. Facebook announced it was adding another building to the site, doubling its capacity.
In a press release, Perdue touted the jobs it would bring:
“Creating jobs is my top priority. Facebook’s additional expansion into North Carolina means more high-tech jobs and investment in Rutherford County,” said Gov. Perdue. “Facebook continues to be a ‘friend’ to North Carolina.”
The problem with this scenario is that the majority of these jobs are decidedly not high-tech ones. They’re mostly construction jobs to build the facility. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with construction jobs in general. It’s just that these jobs are only temporary. The full-time staff at the facility will increase a whopping 33%. That sounds impressive until you realize the boost is only from 30 to 40 staff.
Ten extra full-time jobs. That’s it.
You see, these datacenters are automated to the nth degree. They might hold tens of thousands of servers but there typically isn’t much for the on-site staff to do. Any problems are discovered automatically by monitoring software and the staff most likely does little more than the monkey-work of unracking bad servers and replacing them with good ones. It’s a stretch to call the work high-tech.
Unlike the Dell computer factory that earned state incentives a few years back, there are no coattails to ride from a datacenter. A computer factory might also be highly automated but at least a computer factory spawns a parts ecosystem around it to keep those production lines humming.
Datacenters don’t create that same ecosystem. They have a much smaller need for parts. Facebook uses its own, custom-designed computers, too, further keeping the company’s power costs low and its need for COTS (commercial, off the shelf) supplies at a minimum. The local Forest City computer store isn’t going to strike it rich from supplying computer motherboards to Facebook.
The real reason datacenters set up shop in North Carolina is to take advantage of the state’s low electricity rates. It’s not our well-educated workforce or our high quality of life which attracts these projects, it’s our cheap electricity. Many of these datacenters consume dozens of megawatts of electricity: electricity generated mostly from dirty coal power plants. In effect we’re trading the natural beauty of our state (and several million dollars of taxes) for poor air quality; windowless, faceless buildings; and a few dozen jobs.
Let’s see a press release about that.